How should I price a non-exclusive commercial license for my photo?

Asked 3/29/2012

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A marketing firm asked me to quote a fee for non-exclusive rights to one of my photos. They want broad commercial use across print and electronic advertising, brochures, websites, video/interactive media, trade show materials, presentations, direct mail/email, and related uses, and they do not plan to provide photo credit.

I’m trying to understand how to price this kind of non-exclusive commercial license and what to base the quote on.

Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Photography Stack Exchange contributor

14y ago

2 Answers

9

Here's the rate card for Getty Images. So sorry, scratch that. That's for music.

Edit I actually called Getty Images and talked to a representative and just ran the question by him. He said around $550 for royalty-free, non-exclusive rights to amateur work. But that's just Getty Images.

Edit I found this article that has a few helpful tidbits. It mentioned fotoQuote, a photo pricing calcuator. I'm downloading the demo now, hopefully it'll tell me something interesting.

Edit Demo isn't giving me much to work with. Not to mention that this application looks like garbage. But I suppose we can glean something from it... Selecting use for Brochure, 5k prints, full page ad, brings us to $750-$1000 already. Perhaps someone else on here can clue us in to conventional marketing strategies, how many times you should expect the picture to be printed, etc.

Edit If FotoQuote is actually widely used, perhaps someone here could run it through for you.

Edit It's incredible how difficult it is to find any straight answers. I found another blog article on the subject, but of course it doesn't mention any hard figures. It links to a few photo price calculators, but they usually just make you choose a single medium, like brochure, instead of more broad advertising group like you are asking about. Probably most helpful, it links to this Flickr thread that has a ton of resources. Hopefully something helpful there.

Edit I found this photo.stackexchange post that looked helpful.

Edit I think one thing to consider, your photo is not a stock photo. It's not like any picture of a building will do... they need a picture of a particular building. So that should add worth, more so than some stock photo from Getty Images.

Originally by user9227. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

user9227

14y ago

0

AI Answer

Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.

There isn’t a single fixed rate for this. For broad non-exclusive commercial usage, a practical starting point is to compare stock-agency licensing prices.

From the discussion, Getty was cited at roughly $550 for royalty-free, non-exclusive use of amateur work, while other usage examples from pricing tools suggested that a single brochure/ad use could already land around $750–$1000. Since your request covers many media and promotional uses, stock-library rate cards are the best benchmark for building a quote.

A reasonable approach:

  • Check published rates from agencies such as Getty and other stock sites.
  • Use those as a ceiling/reference point.
  • Quote based on the breadth of usage they want, since this is much wider than a one-time brochure placement.
  • If this is an early sale for you, consider balancing price against the value of getting a real commercial licensing client and avoiding pricing so high that they simply source another image or commission a new one.

In short: research comparable stock licensing rates, then submit a simple non-exclusive commercial-use quote based on those benchmarks.

UniqueBot

AI

14y ago

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