As of today, my stock photography content will no longer be available on Canva, the online design site.
This was somewhat of a tough decision. I have always thought Canva had really come up with a unique selling point to bring in buyers of stock content. An online, easy to use, design tool, with a library of photos and vectors that could be incorporated into work for just $1 an image, for the one time use. This license paid the creator $.35 on that $1 from the buyer. For a one time use, that seems more than fair. For a while, I had pretty good income from the Canva site. I was very happy with this paradigm and the results. However, several things happened at Canva that decimated my income there to less than 10% of my better months.
Most importantly, Canva launched a subscription plan called “Photos Unlimited” which offers 250 images monthly for $12.95 and acquired two large “free” image banks. https://about.canva.com/news/canva-acquires-pexels-pixabay/ In that release, Canva says this:
The new subscription model from Canva rivals traditional stock photography services from Shutterstock and Stocksy, and boasts an industry leading 50/50 revenue share agreement with their contributors.
The reason they mention Stocksy is because Stocksy has an industry leading revenue share with contributors of 50% of license sales (75% of extended license sales) which aims to make producing content a sustainable business. It is not a subscription plan. However, Canva’s 50% is quite different. To pay contributors, Canva takes all of the income from subscription sales, keeps half for themselves, and then divides the other half by the number of images licensed for use. Then, the contributor receives that amount times the number of subscription downloaded licenses that were theirs. For instance, if Canva took in $2,000,000 in subscription sales for a month, and licensed 5,000,000 images through the plan, that would be $1 million / 5 million DLs = $.20 paid per download. Instead of the $.35 previously paid in the “a la carte” system. This is almost half of what I receive per download from the industry leader, Shutterstock.
To make matters worse, the subscription plan license is a full royalty free license. Not a one-time use license. So, this is now an apples to apples comparison.
Additionally, having acquired those “free” image banks, it behooves Canva to boost that content in the search to showcase “free” content to buyers, which helps to bury content from outside contributors. I’m not sure if the “free”, wholly owned content downloads in a subscription plan are counted towards the royalty calculation, but it if were, that would be even more reason to push outside contributors down in a search, because they could keep that portion for themselves.
Even worse, Canva started including Getty Images as a “partner”, adding 50 million pieces of content to their library. I can’t compete with that kind of flood of content. So smaller contributors see their work being buried and not sold.
The main point of this, is that the full RF license royalty Canva has paid since the subscription program began is around $.20 . I can’t encourage this race to bottom. It will not even “be made up in volume” as we are so often told when these things happen. So, I asked Canva to disable my account. I also told them I would be happy to re-enable when one of two things happen. Either a subscription plan minimum at the industry level is implemented, or an opt-out for subscription sales is added. For now, you can find my work on Adobe Stock, Shutterstock and Dreamstime.
For another contributor’s perspective, read this article: https://www.alltageinesfotoproduzenten.de/2019/10/09/canva-unlimited-ernuechternde-analyse-der-ersten-umsaetze/ English translation: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.alltageinesfotoproduzenten.de%2F2019%2F10%2F09%2Fcanva-unlimited-ernuechternde-analyse-der-ersten-umsaetze%2F
