If you shoot, distribute, license, sell or post digital photos to the Internet, associating metadata with those images should be a key part of your workflow.  

The topic of metadata is so important that ImageSpan, with liveBooks and the Bay Area-based Renegade Meetup group hosted a presentation on metadata that drew more than 20 photographers to an after-hours event at liveBooks offices last Wednesday evening.

Digital photo files can include descriptive, technical and administrative metadata. Virtual compartments in image files can hold several types of data – from pixels that make up an image to the text that identifies and describes the image. Metadata contained in an image file can list an image’s creator, copyright holder, source and description. It can explain rights released and available to an image. It can list how and when an image was created, its size, color characteristics and more.

PCWorld Senior Editor Melissa Perenson launched the metadata meeting last week with an example that illustrated why metadata is so important.

“Somewhere I have a photo of my parent’s surprise 40th anniversary party, but when it came time for their 50th anniversary party, I couldn’t find it,” Perenson said. “It may have been in a filing cabinet or on a hard drive that is long-since dead and I didn’t even realize it.”

Had she been able to use metadata to more efficiently identify and store her now 10-year-old images, Perenson said, she may have been able to locate them more readily.

“This demonstrates how metadata is critical both for the retention and preservation of our images,” she added. "It’s also critical if you want to do something with your images, such as find or license them.”

So what is metadata?

Travel photographer David Sanger noted that metadata “really is any information associated with an image.” 

He projected an image on the room’s video screen of a slide with an older-model automobile on it labeled “1986 Chevrolet Caprice, Big Rim Miami.” Said Sanger: “This is the way we used to do it, by putting a slide ID and a caption on a sticky label.”  With the rise of the Internet and advances in photo workflow software, Sanger added, things have changed dramatically.He projected an image of Einstein as a boy and an associated computerized page that displayed a staggering amount of data on who else was in the photo, when it was taken,

a list of keywords the size of a pocket dictionary, and information about how and where it can be licensed.

“The principal is that you want the metadata at a minimum to describe the ‘who, what, where, when and why’ – the basic rules of journalism,” he said. “The first place to start is with a file name. File names ideally describe the content in the photography so you know right away from looking at it what it is.”

Sanger noted that with some cameras, the moment an image is shot it gets a number associated with it that stays with it and with every version of that image, whether it is a JPEG, a TIFF, or a NEF. Such cameras also may attach technical metadata, such as the shutter speed, location-specific information using GPS, and even the serial number of your camera. In addition, some cameras allow you to apply a copyright directly into a file when the shutter is pressed.

Brian Pobuda, a corporate photographer who also consults as a digital asset management specialist, agreed that file naming is the most critical place to begin. 

“To me, metadata starts right there,” he said. “Never let out an image without least your name and the date and the subject matter, because it’s a way to keep track of your babies. I always consider photos babies and you want to give them a good home, so put a file name on them because any good digital asset management system will pick up file naming as keywords, and that’s very useful. You’ll never regret it.”

In addition to helping a photographer identify his or her image files, metadata can also help a him or her track files and speed workflow.

Benefits of Metadata

So why else attach metadata?

“Well, copyright is one reason,” said Sanger. “If you have an image and it has a caption, keywords and a copyright, major search engines such as Google Images will pick that up, too.”

Rafael Solis of ImageSpan said that “if you don’t have metadata associated with your image, then there’s a dis-connect between the buyer and the content owner. In other words, anyone who is looking to buy or use your image may not only be unable to find it, but they won’t be able to find you to license it.”         

That’s why LicenseStream enables its users to apply a range of metadata, including the creator’s name, Web address, keywords and captions. Solis pointed to a LicenseStream screen that showed an image of a sunset titled “San Francisco Purple Haze,” and noted the image is accompanied by a unique identification number. “That unique ID if decoded essentially communicates who owns the image, what are the different license types available for that image, any restrictions.” Once your work is published to the Web, metadata can help protect you’re your rightful financial compensation.

“Great metadata enables tracking,” Solis said, “which goes hand-in-hand with the ability to search for it, query it, and facilitate a transaction to monetize it.”

In fact, LicenseStream Content Tracker with Digimarc for Images uses metadata to track and find images that are uploaded through LicenseStream. Digimarc for Images adds an imperceptible digital watermark to communicate copyright ownership and information on how to contact the owner wherever the image is found online.

Content Tracker can then find the owner’s images and report back on where and how they are being used so the creator can take steps to address unauthorized uses. The creator can then opt to send an email requesting that the image be licensed, linked back to the creator’s website, or that the author be credited.

Tomorrow, we’ll take a closer look at the application of metadata, why it’s important for your business, and provide links to websites where you can learn more about metadata.

Have questions or comments about this blog post? Please feel free to share them by clicking on the "Comments" link below.   

Apple created such a buzz around the launch of its latest hot product -- the iPad -- two weeks ago that sites and services all over the net slowed to a crawl and some suffered outages for upwards of 20 minutes. At the AlwaysOn OnMedia conference in New York a few days later, Apple’s new product remained a hot topic. Consider the amount of discussion about how this new product will not support flash by participants on a single panel, “Online Video…Who Profits?”

This kind of awareness is not created solely by the Apple PR machine, but is a clear indication of the widespread interest in changing the way we as consumers experience media. The demand for a real interactive experience and a thirst for new information mean the demand for high-quality, easily licensable content has never been greater.

Just look at the impact of the iPad. Although not as revolutionary as some had predicted, Apple's 10-inch touch screen iPad tablet packs a mighty punch. Along with the ability to surf the Web and handle email, the device can stream video from sites like YouTube and Vimeo and is capable of running powerful applications like iWork. In addition, Apple introduced iBooks.  The ability to download books is nothing new, but the iPad reader app adds a fresh look and feel to the idea of reading from a digital device.

Among the print publications featured in Apple’s official demo video for the iPad were LicenseStream customer SPIN magazine and The New York Times. At launch, Martin Nisenholtz, a senior vice president at The New York Times showcased a version of the paper on the iPad that displayed just like the regular paper, but that could be manipulated by the user to zoom in to read articles, flick through pages and access video right from within news articles. Nisenholtz’s declaration that “this is just the beginning,” makes it clear that the executives at Gray Lady are embracing the iPad in a big way.

WHY DO I CARE?

Companies such as The New York Times and other large publications already use massive amounts of visual content on a daily basis. They also face the growing costs of producing this content. In addition, advances in digital fingerprinting, watermarking and tracking for online content are forcing changes in the media industry as they require greater accountability by sites and publications that otherwise might use content illegally or without proper licensing.

Demand for content will continue to grow exponentially as newspapers, magazines and other media companies form business relationships with companies that are creating new conduits to the consumer – whether it’s Apple’s iPAD, Amazon’s Kindle or Barnes & Noble’s Nook. As a result, the ability for media companies such as The New York Times to search for and easily license digital content is more important than ever.  Just as important is the need of the photographer or videographer to be fairly compensated for the original content he or she creates.

ImageSpan's LicenseStream with ImageSpan's partners already provide the tools to make your digital media license-ready, and to monitor, manage and monetize unauthorized usage.

In addition, ImageSpan and its partners are making it easier for potential purchasers or your content – such as The New York Times – to monetize the content they publish. Instead of relying solely on advertising – which is a reactive model as ImageSpan CEO Iain Scholnick pointed out during a recent AlwaysOn OnMedia conference  panel in New York titled, “What's the Online Monetization Strategy that Will Save News & Publishing?”, content creators and owners should play to their strengths – which is leveraging their creative content more efficiently and effectively.  To actually monetize the content, he added, content developers need to be able to link into a licensing backbone, such as the one LicenseStream provides, from any iPad (or for that matter, iPhone) applications they’re creating to distribute content.

The upshot? LicenseStream offers content owners of all sizes a powerful solution that makes it easier for editorial and other media companies to find and license the content they need.

The SF MusicTech Summit attracted hundreds of participants in the music and technology industries to the Hotel Kabuki in San Francisco earlier this week, where the buzz focused primarily on the launch of Google music.

 

In fact, the most exciting presentation probably came from Google’s own RJ  Pittman, who demonstrated how, by leveraging the technology of LaLa, iLike, Pandora and iMeem, you can now preview music directly from search results in Google Music. For example, you can type in a band name, song title, or even the lyrics from a given song, and the top search results will allow you to instantly listen to the song you were seeking. This offers a more efficient way to search for music. And because once the search result comes up you can click “buy” on one of the partner sites to complete a purchase, it closes the gap between instantly previewing and purchasing.

 

This approach also validates ImageSpan’s strategy with LicenseStream, which also closes the gap between search, discovery and payment. In fact, LicenseStream already lets content owners publish their content directly to their own online store or anywhere else on the Web and to global search engines, enabling anyone in the world to find their search-optimized content and pay for it with a mouse click.  

 

This SF MusicTech Summit was a departure from previous ones in that the tone of discussions were less “woe is me…the biz is changing” and bit more positive about the outlook (I think I only heard somebody say that CD’s are obsolete about 20 times—down from 50). As a result, I had chance to see plenty of great talks and presentations focused on the current state and future of the music industry.

 

Among the cool things I heard was a talk by Pandora’s CTO, Tom Conrad, who said that the streaming audio service would be integrated into car stereos in the next year or so. Being a huge fan of Pandora, I would love this development.

 

Also of interest was an item I heard from iLike founder Ari Partovi, who said that his company has partnered with SoundExchange to distribute royalties to unsigned artists who haven’t been able to collect thus far. SoundExchange specializes in recording royalties on digital and satellite streams – areas not handled by iLike. However, this effort is not about direct royalty payments. Instead, SoundExchange is performing database matching for artists who have uploaded their information onto iLike.  Partovi estimated that about $8 million in uncollected royalties sitting in escrow will be distributed via SoundExchange to about 8,000 artists (roughly about a $1,000 will be sent to each artist).

 

It’s great to see the music space embracing technology and creating new ways to reach audiences and monetize content. This summit made it clear to me that with so many great tools and services at hand, it’s a very exciting time to be a musician and artist.  

 

 

 

Need a little extra cash? The good news is that for most photographers, the holidays offer a cornucopia of opportunities to generate new revenues. Whether you're just starting out or you're a veteran photographer, now is a great time to build out your portfolio and extend your business reach.

This week, we'll look at the first five of 10 ways to engage your clients during the holidays and even into the New Year. While some of these ideas may seem obvious to some of you, they are all-too-easy to skip in the holiday rush and thus worth highlighting. To keep costs down, much of the outreach can occur via email instead of snail mail.

1. Create a "Year in Review" Gallery & Newsletter
   Create a "Year in Review" Gallery within LicenseStream and send to existing and prospective new clients. Include some of your best work from the past year (for more information on showcasing your work with Galleries, see below). In your email to clients be sure to highlight your plans for the coming year, and include a calendar of your upcoming events, including workshops, exhibitions, open studios, or any high-profile photo shoots that you can mention.
   
   
2. Send out a Photo Greeting Card or Photo Calendar
   Include some suggestions for gifts, including holiday family portraits, holiday pet portraits, photo greeting cards, photo calendars, even photo advent calendars. Use an image from your LicenseStream gallery and include an embedded link to drive traffic back where clients can view similar images or galleries in your LicenseStream store.
   
   
3. Offer Specials for Business Referrals
   Invite existing customers to visit your LicenseStream store for year-end specials. On the front page of your store, offer discounts to existing customers who refer business to you, and promotion codes for new customers who come to you via referral. Such specials during the holidays open the door for repeat customers.
   
   
4. Build and Send Special Lightboxes to Clients
   Build and send to appropriate targeted clients a year-end greeting with a lightbox of images for each of your specialties. Be sure to select images that differentiate you creatively from other photographers who work in those niche areas. When appropriate, invite clients to view work within a related specialty or sub-specialty. For example, if you're targeting clients who typically purchase images of landscapes, invite them to see images of wildlife, plants and flowers, or of specific types of scenery (for example, "deserts") or region (e.g. "Coastal California"). 
   
   
5. Promote Special Photography Packages
   Promote multi-generation family packages to include separate children, parent and grandparent portraits as well as pictures of the entire family. Provide a link to a LicenseStream gallery that shows samples of your work and backdrops. After the portraits are taken, suggest that customers provide links to additional friends and family who may want to purchase some of the images or arrange portrait sessions for themselves or other family.
   

Finally, be sure to include a personal year-end message of thanks to your client base on your home page. You might do this by adding to or editing your bio on your home LicenseStream page.  

Check back next week for five additional ways to engage with clients during the holiday season -- and beyond.

Showcase Your Work with Galleries in LicenseStream

LicenseStream galleries are a great way to Showcase a variety of work to your existing clients and generate interest in your work. As mentioned above you may choose to put together a "Year in Review" newsletter. A great addition to this is to create a LicenseStream gallery with a selection of images that show what you have been working on in 2009.

Create a New Gallery

Before you create a LicenseStream Gallery please make sure the images you are adding to your gallery are already added to your LicenseStream Store.

To create a new gallery you will need to follow these steps:

1. Go to "Manage Content"
2. Click on "Create new Gallery" on the right side of the page (1.)
3. Enter Gallery name (suggestion: Best of 2009)

 

 Add Content to Your LicenseStream Gallery

1. Go to "Manage Content"
2. Mouse over the thumbnail to select the content you would like to add to the Gallery
3. On the right side under "Actions" choose "Add Selected to"(2.) and select "Gallery" from the drop down list.
4. Select your new Gallery from the list:

 

Manage Your LicenseStream Gallery

Once you have created your Gallery and added content, you can access the Gallery to customize it by clicking on the Gallery name on the right hand side of the page:

You can:

• View the content in the Gallery
• Sort the order of the images in the Gallery
• Edit the Gallery name
• Create a direct link to the Gallery
  (i.e., store.licensestream.com/[storename]/[Galleryname])

Your Gallery will automatically be added to your Store Front and you can include that URL or the direct link to the gallery in your end of year newsletter.

Please note: You must use the Gallery Grid template for your Store Front to display the Galleries as per the screenshot below. To change your Store Front view, please go to your Store Manager and from the 'Store Front' tab select 'Template 2: Gallery Promotion with Gallery Selection Grid'.

For more information on this process and other helpful tips you can visit our online help guide and browse topics in the "Manage Content" section. 

 

In our previous post we looked at how various traditional licensing models – as well as a new hybrid licensing model we developed for our LicenseStream service – affect pricing for photography. This time, we’ll look at the licensing model most favored by top photography pros – Rights Managed (RM) licensing. The pros favor this model because it maximizes the opportunity for the creator to ensure fair payment based on the value of the image to the client.

 

Depending on the client vertical to whom you are licensing an RM image, the pricing will vary.  When addressing an average price per image for RM images, it is best to break it down by client segment: Editorial (book publishers, magazine publishers, newspaper publishers, broadcast TV, etc.); Corporate (in-house corporate design, corporate websites); and Commercial (Advertising and Graphic Design).   For the purpose of determining an average price per image, we’ll look at the Editorial, Corporate, and Commercial client segments.  

 

• Editorial:
  When licensing an image to an editorial end user, pricing is typically based on how, where and for how long it will be used.  Bear in mind that the image is not being used to sell a product in an editorial instance.  However, it is being used to tell a story.  While you will not obtain the larger fee you could expect for an image used to sell a product, you should be compensated fairly.  A majority of images for editorial usage appear inside a publication at less than a ½ page. If a photographer is selling his or her work directly, a good average book rate per RM image within the editorial industry would be $200 - $300.  While it does not sound like a lot, there is a great potential for large volumes of imagery to be used within editorial projects.
  
  The other very important point to understand about editorial RM pricing is that almost every publisher has set rates they will pay for imagery – all below “market value.” However, editorial clients use a ton of images, so it is in the best interest of the photo agency or photographer to agree to the rates.  Editorial clients rarely “commit” to certain levels of volume around these rates, but if you are agreeable to them, they WILL visit your site and license your content when they can.  If you do not agree to their rates, you can be fairly certain that they will not visit your site at all.  Their average set rates would come in lower than the above noted price, probably closer to $125 - $175 on average – sometimes lower.
  

• Corporate:
  As corporations try to cut costs, they are pulling in-house a lot of “below the line” design work. As a result, that Annual Report or bill stuffer that used to be farmed out to an ad agency or design firm today is typically designed by an in-house corporate team.  Most of these folks come from the advertising world and are familiar with being creative and sourcing imagery, but may not be used to working within a strict budget.  You will find that finance people are actually involved upfront in negotiations with a photo supplier and will (similar to the editorial clients) require set rates for their work.  As with editorial clients, corporations typically repeat the way their images are used, so it is easy for them to require set rates. For example, they may only produce 36 brochures per year.  So every time they use an image, it will be in a brochure.  They are more likely to negotiate these rates with you upfront to fit within their budget before their creatives can start searching for images.  Once they set rates with a handful of suppliers (although sometimes it is as few as 1-3 suppliers), they know how much the photography is going to cost and their creatives may go only to vendors with whom the finance people have negotiated deals to source imagery.  It is very rare that larger corporations will not have a list of such “preferred vendors.”
  
  As for pricing, rates for corporate work reflect the fact that the way companies use images falls somewhere between editorial and commercial uses. Neither are they (arguably) really selling a product as they would sell one in an ad campaign, nor are they simply telling a story in a book or a magazine article. A good average price per image for corporate usages could range from $350 - $500.
  

• Commercial:
  When licensing an image to an Advertising Agency or Graphic Design firm, it is extremely important that you ask a LOT of questions.  Never quote a price for a multi media advertising usage until you can actually see the ad and understand how hard your image is working. How critical is the image to the success of the campaign.  Is it the main focus of the ad? In other words, is your image what ultimately will sell that product?  If so, raise your price!  A good average price per image for advertising is $1000.  A GREAT average price per image for advertising is $1500.  When someone wants to license an image to appear on a billboard in New York City’s Times Square, you will charge quadruple what you would charge to have it appear on a billboard in Podunk, USA – why?  Because more eyes are going to see the image on the Times Square billboard, it is working harder in New York City than it is in Podunk.
  

We hope this in-depth review of licensing models and how they affect pricing has been helpful. Please feel free to let us know if there are any aspects of applying these licensing models that we have not addressed. 

 

 

How do you price your content for licensing?  It depends on a few key variables, including the type of content you want to license and the licensing model you select for that content. In this blog, we’re looking at pricing photographs, and so a key variable to consider is the goal of the photographer.

 

For example, are you (or the photographer you represent) targeting a specific market with a particular set of images?  Are you looking for the big single image license, or would you prefer to see your image(s) licensed multiple times to a number of different end users? The process of asking such questions applies to all the types of content that can be licensed through ImageSpan’s LicenseStream, including photos or other images, video, audio, even text and will help you determine the type of licensing models you’ll select.

 

Before we review how to select the best licensing model for your work, it may be helpful to look at some of the unique services LicenseStream offers and at how they will help you maximize the value of your work.

 

One is LicenseStream’s automated pricing engine. ImageSpan has conducted extensive research to ensure the automated pricing engine available in LicenseStream generates accurate pricing. Our platform also is designed so that you, the image creator, may allow people to license images for specific usages, types of media, regions, dollar amount, etc.  This empowers you as the content owner to negotiate larger deals – and not leave any money on the table.  Image buyers, especially when licensing their content for a large media buy or for an exclusive license, typically prefer to speak with someone to ensure they are obtaining the proper rights, etc. LicenseStream facilitates this exchange by building an email function into the licensing request process. Once the rights are agreed upon, completing the transaction with LicenseStream provides a clear record of the agreement’s terms and can be transacted by you (or the content owner you represent), or your client.

 

LicenseStream offers another unique advantage to both the content creator and the buyer: our licensing process generates licenses using the PLUS code – a machine-readable code that provides critical information such as the rights attached to a specific image and the license’s expiration date. This is extremely helpful for publishers using the content and who license very high volumes of images and need a way to track all the rights that they already have. Equipped with the ability to access the information provided in the machine-readable code, publishers can know exactly when and for what purposes they need to re-license an image.  At the same time, the PLUS code helps you as the content creator ensure that your clients use the images only as defined by and for the length of time the license permits.

 

However, before you even assign a price to content, you need to determine the business model you’d like to wrap around your content. In this post, we’ll review three established licensing models and one new model developed by ImageSpan as a response to the needs of our subscribers.

 

Royalty Free 

Pricing Royalty Free content is simple – it is based on the size of the image, video or other content that the buyer needs. It places no limitations on usage or duration of usage on the part of the licensee. Generally, the only limitation is that buyers cannot resell the image. For photographs or videos, pricing usually varies based on the resolution of the piece that is bought (i.e. higher resolution images cost more money). Standard Royalty Free prices range anywhere from approximately $39 to $500 for a single image.  Today, Royalty Free images also are available via a subscription model or on an old-fashioned CD, whereby a client pays an upfront fee, per user, to gain unlimited access to a pool of imagery for a certain period of time. 

 

Rights Managed 

Where image pricing really gets fun is when you are working with Rights Managed (RM) imagery.  Favored by top pros, this model ensures that a work’s creator gets paid fairly based on the value to the client. Because this model can be so complex, it typically isn’t used with lower-priced transactions. Several factors enter into RM imagery.  Pricing is based on how an image will be used, where it will be used, length of usage, type and amount of distribution and exclusivity.  For the most part, RM licenses are non-exclusive, meaning the -customer understands that someone within their industry may use the same image.  For very high-profile ad campaigns, book covers, even greeting cards and other photo products, the Exclusive license is preferred and in fact it  can be very valuable. 

 

Exclusive

Exclusive licenses typically are used in cases involving high-profile, high-priced licenses to ensure that a competitor does not also use the same image to promote the same product, or in some cases, any other product (as in the case of an all-industry exclusive license).  This type of license should always be negotiated offline and the terms tailored to a specific use.  Once the terms are established, the transaction can be completed online as long as the content owner puts the content with the exclusive pricing in the shopping cart for the customer to the customer can easily complete the transaction. Editorially speaking, you may license an image exclusively for the cover of a magazine or a book.  An exclusive license for the cover of a magazine is going to be LESS than an exclusive license for the cover of a book.  Why?  The life span of a magazine is less than that of a book.  However, the image on the cover of any publication is what will sell the publication.  For the cover of a magazine, I would charge at least an additional 100% of the usage fee for the exclusive. 

 

Selling an exclusive license for the cover of a book is different in that the presumed shelf life of a book, so to speak, tends to be longer and the pricing for book (and therefore the image) typically is higher.  Just as a cover sells a magazine, the cover of a book really does sell a book.  It is important that you ask who the author is, especially for a retail book written by an author that you know will print and re-print.

 

You want to get market value!  Also, remember, when you license an image exclusively, you are blocking that image from being licensed again for that usage, within that industry and for an agreed-upon period of time. Exclusive licenses can go for well over $25,000 - $30,000 or more -- for a single image!  When licensing an image exclusively in the Commercial space, remember, again, it is being used to sell a product – what that agency is going to spend on media vs. what they are going to spend on your image is HUGE – get market value!  For an advertising exclusive, you should add a minimum of $5,000 to $10,000 for a usage fee.

 

Rights Simple

Rights Simple licensing combines the protection and detail of a Rights Managed license with the simplicity of a Royalty Free license. With this unique licensing model, developed by ImageSpan, buyers can get a license for a specific use but they are not limited by the industry or the region in which they use the work. It can be selected in a single click and all the terms of the license are included in the simple statement. In most cases, Rights Simple transactions of similar quality are priced higher than Royalty Free and lower than Rights Managed.  

Choose the Licensing Model that Best Meets Your Goals

Pricing is always an interesting challenge. Before you assign a price, it is critical that you carefully consider the benefits of each licensing model and how that selection affects pricing. For example, while a Rights Managed image may sell for a high price, the market for such an image may be limited. If you’re looking to expand your market, Royalty Free content may find a broader user base than Rights managed content, however, revenue from individual Royalty Free sales likely will be lower. Similarly, Rights Simple content may be priced low, but it is likely to find a larger market and appeal to buyers that usually don’t purchase stock, namely commercial media and advertising firms.  

Coming Up

Next week we’ll take a deeper look at the licensing model most favored by top photography pros – Rights Managed images.

 

 

 

 

The SanFran MusicTech Summit in San Francisco earlier this week brought together hundreds of participants in the music and technology industries – all interested in learning more about the evolving music/business/technology ecosystem. The focus is a good one during a time when every type of media industry is struggling with how to make money and capture the full potential of the new media.

ImageSpan’s CEO Iain Scholnick participated on a panel about music in audio-visual works, a thorny topic in a world where, as Iain pointed out, the fragmentation of content means that most companies have a tough time justifying the cost of putting the head as well as the long tail of their content on their Web. Why? Because the money they make doesn’t cover what they need to spend to cover costs associated with processing content licensing transactions. In addition, and as blogger Chris Hansen points out in his coverage of the event on Webbed Footprint, regardless of most artists’ business model, everyone agrees that it still takes a long time to get paid online.

That is, until now.

ImageSpan’s LicenseStream addresses both problems. At ImageSpan, we understand that companies as well as individuals with media assets today want to make their entire catalogs – not just the hits – available online to maximize their assets’ value. With our LicenseStream platform, both individuals and companies can extract value from both the head and long tail of content at a reasonable cost. At the same time, our platform can deliver payment in a timely manner.

How is all this possible? By automating the costly, manual processes of registering, licensing, tracking, accepting payment and distributing royalties for creative content – photos, images, music and even text -- LicenseStream’s royalty distribution services can deliver immediate payment to content providers anywhere in the world – minus the hefty costs of building systems to manage these new value streams. 

In addition, cloud-based LicenseStream enables efficient publication to the Web and major search engines where content can be easily found and immediately licensed to drive revenues. To learn more, check out our services at www.licensestream.com.  You can try a 30-day free trial of our LicenseStream Creator service by clicking here.

Do you have Rights Managed licenses that you use on a regular basis? With new updates to LicenseStream you can now save these licenses and re-use or modify them over and over again.

You can apply these Ready Made licenses to images in your gallery so that they appear to potential buyers or use them yourself when you need to present licenses for private client images. When Gallery visitors see an image, any Ready Made license you've created will automatically appear as a convenient choice.

Plus, we've added new Gallery Management features that allow you to assign or remove Ready Made licenses with the click of a button.

We've also added a "Contact Me" feature for your Gallery images. When you apply this feature, potential image buyers are prompted to enter their contact information and a brief description. This information is then automatically emailed to you through LicenseStream. This is a great feature when you want complete control over the pricing of certain images.

Most top photographers understand the need to focus on an area of specialty if they want to grow their business. We recently posted on Marketing Your Photos – Start with A Niche and Marketing Your Photos - Expand On a Successful Niche. With this post, we’ll explore how to use LicenseStream Galleries to power your niche photography.

First and foremost, LicenseStream Galleries give you the means to display and sell your images to buyers around the world, using your choice of licensing models.

The key elements to your Galleries are groups, keywords and descriptions. Before setting up your gallery, you will want to consider your plans for the future. Let’s have a look at how your plans affect your choices within these areas.

Groups
Are you going to have one single niche or are you likely to eventually expand into multiple areas of specialty? If you have just one niche then your entire gallery will be built around that niche and your group naming structure will reflect that. For instance, if your niche is around wilderness shots, you might have groups like:

• Forest
• Desert
• Marine
• Mountains

However, if you are going to include outdoors sports as well as wilderness, you might have groups like:

• Sports – Kayaking
• Sports – Mountain Biking
• Sports – Climbing
• Wilderness – Forest
• Wilderness – Desert
• Wilderness – Mountains

 

Keywords
Assigning keywords to photos with the Keyword Generator and adding your own descriptive keywords is pretty straightforward. That said, it’s a great idea to give some thought up front to the types of buyers who will be searching through your Gallery. For instance, depending on who you cater to, an art director in an agency may well use different terms than an independent Web designer.

It’s also important to be consistent in your conventions for keyword selection.  For example, imagine if you have a lot of shots of Florida beaches and some of them were keyworded with the beach and state (Cocoa Beach, Florida), while some of them were only  keyworded with the state (Beach, Florida). In that case, imagine a buyer searching for “Cocoa Beach.” They would receive a set of results and think that they had a complete set of Cocoa Beach photos, when in fact some of the best ones could be missing due to your inconsistency in keywording.

Descriptions
Your photo descriptions in the gallery are another valuable tool. They are an excellent place to describe and set context for your photos. They are also searchable within your Galleries. As with keywords, give some thought to your buyers and the kind of language they relate to and are likely to use in their searches.

It’s also good to decide in advance how your Gallery will interact with your existing Web site or blog. If you have a showcase of your niche images on your site, it’s a fairly straightforward process to add individual photo links to each image on your site so buyers can license them directly through LicenseStream (see Setting Up Your Site or Blog to Sell Stock Using LicenseStream). Alternately, you can link to your Gallery home page rather than specific photos. This is a great strategy for email signatures, bios, business listings, etc.

Happy Shooting!

I’ve seen a number of photographers lately who have websites that link to major internet stock photo services and it strikes me that this is not a wise move.

Here’s the scenario:

• Photographer attracts a potential customer to their Web site.
• Potential customer is interested in licensing an image.
• Potential customer clicks on “buy” link and is taken to a site where the photographer’s work is surrounded by that of thousands of competitors, many competing at bargain basement pricing.

Doesn’t sound like the best scenario, does it? Don’t get me wrong, there can be a lot of value in the huge stock sites for photographers and some do very well from them. That said, they may be a good place to get customers, but are a horrible place to send customers.

LicenseStream shines at helping photographers avoid this scenario. By using the e-commerce back end that comes with every LicenseStream subscription, you can easily add a “purchase license” link with every image you want to sell on your site.

With LicenseStream e-commerce enabled on your site, you also can choose between Rights Managed, Royalty Free and Rights Simple licensing models (or use all three).

Check out the Setting Up Your Site or Blog to Sell Stock post to find out how LicenseStream can help you to enable e-commerce on your site.

Note: While this article speaks to photo sites, it’s equally valid for those selling stock video.