Today, I’d like to introduce you to a new place that you can license my royalty free stock photo content from. It’s right here on my seanlockephotography.com site! It’s built on a relatively new platform called “Symbiostock” and allows you to license directly from me, without a middle man.
Not that a middle man is always a bad thing. However, as agencies tend to get more ruthless with their royalty cutting and treatment of contributors, artists have been looking for a way to band together (sort of) to create a selling platform that anyone would be able to host.
The answer arose in a WordPress based open source project called Symbiostock. The project was captained by illustrator Leo Blanchette. The artist community rallied around the effort, and today, there are more than 100 thousand images in the network, hosted on more than 150 different websites. I say “in the network”, because the interesting thing about the system is that the artist’s site doesn’t need to exist in a vacuum. There is a neat functionality that links sites together, so that a search on one site can return results from many different sites, listed below the initial site’s results. Below, I’ve clipped my search return, and a line from another site that appears below it.
It’s a great way for artists to work together, without necessarily hurting their own business. Every site is also indexed in a global search site, found here.
The system uses Paypal to facilitate transfer of the licensing fees, and the best thing for the artist is that, aside from the Paypal fees, they get to keep the entire royalty from the image sale. A buyer may find this an attractive idea – helping to keep the fees paid to a fellow artist higher than going through an agency for the same content, which could return as low as 15% to the creator.
So, stop by and spend some of your licensing dollars at my Symbiostock shop, and maybe you’ll even find something unexpected !
