today i'm going to talk about
exclusivity on
eyestock is it better to be an exclusive
or
non-exclusive photographer or
videographer
let's find out
hey guys welcome back if this is your
first time here
my name is luca and i'm a stock
photographer and videographer
i'm making videos about stock
photography videography
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subscribe to my channel okay so today
we're talking about
exclusivity on istock and
what is exclusivity well if you're
an independent non-exclusive contributor
you can
upload your content so images videos or
audio to multiple agencies so 5
10 or even 20 if you want but if you
decide to become an exclusive
contributor
on istock or any other site that offers
that
you can only sell your content through
their page
so i stock in our case and get images of
course because
getty owns eyestock well yeah you can
sell
physical prints or t-shirts or pillows
with your photos
but you can sell your work under royalty
free
license and some agencies also offer
image exclusivity so
you can select which images you're only
selling through
that agency at the beginning of my
career as a stock photographer i was
also asking myself why would you even
consider being
an exclusive when you can stay
independent and
upload to all those sites but then
around
one year after i started to upload i met
some other contributors who were
exclusive and i changed my mind became
exclusive
and i'm still happy with that decision
and
i'm not saying it's the right decision
for everyone
but for me it is at that time there was
a requirement of
250 downloads to become exclusive
but now you just need some images in
your portfolio
i don't know how much but you just need
some images
that show you're good enough to be an
exclusive contributor
first let's see what are the benefits of
being a
non-exclusive contributor okay obviously
the first one is that you can
upload images to multiple stock agencies
so
3 5 or even 20 so you can in theory earn
much more money with that i agree that
if we
only look at the revenue side probably
if you upload
images to 10 different agencies you
would earn more money than if you just
upload all those images to istock as an
exclusive contributor
but there's more to that and we'll cover
that
in a little bit second benefit of being
non-exclusive is that you don't have
all your eggs in one basket so if one
side
istock in our case goes bankrupt you
still have images on
all those other sides and you're making
money from there and
that's it i think if you know any other
benefits
let me know down in the comments okay
let's now also see the benefits of being
an exclusive contributor
first let's see what istock says and
then i also
cover some more that are also very
important for me
first benefit and probably most
important are
higher prices of exclusive images and
also
high percentage pays to a contributor
let's see what that
means the price of an exclusive image is
three times higher than the price of a
non-exclusive image
so you're instantly earning three times
more
but that's not everything if you're a
non-exclusive contributor you'll get
15 of the price the client paid for the
image
no matter how many images you've sold in
the past
but if you're an exclusive contributor
the starting point is
25 and it goes up to 45
depending on how many images you sold in
the previous year
of course you can only dream of reaching
that 45
but 40 is doable if you're willing to
work
hard for a few years so let's say you're
an exclusive photographer
at 35 percent in that case you'll earn
seven times more money with the same
image as you would as a non-exclusive
photographer
and what can also happen because the
same image will be
three times more expensive than before
is that you'll sell
a little bit less images but also
they're saying that they're pushing
exclusive content in search more than
non-exclusive
so you should sell more images because
of that
second benefit that istock says is that
you'll reach more customers and let me
tell you how
as an exclusive contributor your files
go to
signature collection by default but you
have an option to
nominate files for a premium signature
plus collection or
s-plus collection so when you think the
file is premium
of better quality you can nominate it
and inspector will decide if images are
good enough to go to s-plus or not and
all those
as plus files are also available for
purchase on get
images not just i stock so this is how
you can reach
more customers and revenues there
can be quite high but
yeah i have to tell you that some of
them can
also be very very low
for stock videos it's a little bit
different there are no
s plus nominations but all exclusive
video files
are flowing to getty so they're also
available
there third benefit is that as an
exclusive contributor
you have access to creative briefs so
getty has a great team i think it's
called
creative research team or creative
insights
level or something and what that team
does
is they're doing research around search
what are customers typing into the
search where they're searching for their
images
uh which keywords are trending and
similar stuff
they're also talking directly to
customers
but uh not customers like a blogger who
buys five images per year but
bigger companies which are buying
thousands of images per year and are
actually
creating these new trends so
they know what the market needs and what
it will need in the future
which areas are not covered enough on
eyestock and getty
so they're creating these creative
briefs around that
and those briefs that you have access to
as an exclusive contributor
can be a great source of inspiration and
the fourth benefit according to
istock are custom content briefs and
what are those sometimes a company
doesn't want to use
the same images as other companies from
the current stock library
so they reach out to getty with their
specific needs
then getty publishes a brief about
what the company wants about their
visual style
technical requirements blah blah blah
and
you i stock or get a contributor can
decide if you want to shoot for that
brief
or not and from all those
images that were shot and uploaded for a
specific
custom content brief the client will buy
a specific number of
images and the clients will have
exclusive rights
to use those images those images won't
go to your portfolio
but you'll get paid a higher amount than
usual
but if the client will not buy your
images
all those images will automatically go
to your portfolio
to be sold as normal stock photos i'm
planning to do a separate video about
custom content because there are more
things to cover here so
let me know down in the comments if you
would be interested in that
there are also some custom content
briefs that are
for non-exclusive contributors but not
much
just every now and then and earnings
from custom content has been a
big part of my whole revenue in the last
two years so those are the benefits
mentioned on
istock but let me add some more that are
important for me okay i mentioned before
that probably if you upload images to
10 different stock agencies you would
make more money than
if you just upload same images on istock
as an exclusive contributor
but let me give you my calculation on
that so
every agency has their own keywording
system
some of them have categories some don't
and
also categories are different from
agency to agency
so to upload for example 60 images to
istock it takes me a lot of time
already but to upload all those 60
images
to 10 sites that's just
too time consuming for me in that same
time as
uploading to all 10 sites i would
probably be able to
edit images from the whole shoot or
shoot another set of
images in that time or plan a shoot or
two
and that's worth much more to me than
earning those few extra dollars from all
those
10 agencies also as an exclusive
contributor you
only have one keywording system to deal
with because
yeah it's a little bit different on
every site and you don't have to check
on
all those sites if images were accepted
or not
and dealing with all those acceptance
rules
and rejections one more thing that's
pretty huge for me
are istock events istock and getty are
organizing events called ice stock
ellipses around the world
usually two or three times per year and
i was on pretty much all of them since
2013
so i have tons of images from those
events
and images from those events can only be
uploaded
to istock so if i would become
non-exclusive i would not be able to
upload around
half of my portfolio to other stock
sites because of that
and i like to believe that they're
pushing
exclusive content from i stock ellipses
in search because
a lot of my best sellers are from those
events
and also in general i think they're
prioritizing
exclusive content in search i heard a
few times that they're pushing
non-exclusive content because they keep
85
and only pay 15 to contributor
but if you do the math you can see that
if they sell one exclusive image
even if a contributor is at a higher
level so
45 percent getty earns almost twice as
much
as from a non-exclusive image so it's
obvious that
if they want to earn more they want to
push exclusive content more
and of course also to keep contributors
exclusive
i understand that a lot of people will
disagree with me about exclusivity and
that's totally fine i don't want to say
that exclusivity is the
best thing you can do and that you
should definitely be an exclusive
contributor
but it just works great for me but for
some people
it would not work it depends from
portfolio to portfolio
because some images will sell on some
agencies
and not on the others different agencies
have totally different customers and
they also have different needs
and budgets i also haven't seen any
youtuber from the stock photography
field that is an exclusive contributor
well yeah probably i haven't watched all
of them
but those that i did they're all
non-exclusives and
if that works for them that's great
that were my thoughts about exclusivity
let me know if you agree or
disagree or if you have any other
thoughts
or questions i hope you find any useful
information in this video
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already that's it from me today
stay awesome and i'll see you in my next
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