Your Competition

I recently had a conversation with a client, who licenses his work for stock, about watermarking. For those of you who have known me since before I became a lawyer, you’ll likely remember that I used to be anti-watermarking. I used to make the argument that it marred the images too much, that buyers preferred the work clean, and so the protections weren’t worth the marketing downside.

In case you haven’t figured it out yet, I am totally pro-watermarking now.

If you are not watermarking images you put online, in any form, then you are making it far too easy for people to rip you off. Not watermarking is like driving a convertible and deliberately leaving your wallet on the seat when you park, top-down.

Watermarking, however, is not the point of this post. No, it was something that this client said that inspired this post. He mentioned that he had concerns that buyers would be put-off if he watermarked and that he was in competition with companies like Getty so he didn’t want to do that.

Relatedly, today there is news that Corbis is restructuring its stock photo businesses and a leader in the photo world asked, on Twitter, what that meant for the licensing model.

What has one to do with the other? That neither of them have anything to do with your business. Neither Corbis nor Getty are any individual photographer’s competition.

Sure, on first glance it seems like they must be; those companies license photos and so do you so you must be in competition with each other. The thing is, your businesses are so wholly different, under the hood, so to speak, that this superficial resemblance is only that–a resemblance. Corbis and Getty have so many channels of revenue that you don’t even appear as a footnote in any of their financial reports. You don’t matter in their world–you are not their competition.

The good news is, neither are they yours.

Your market is (if you’re running your small creative business right) made up of buyers who are looking for something non-generic. Corbis and Getty are safe (yes, even though they have much better work now than ever); your work should be un-safe, unique, reflective of your individual vision. Your work is (I hope) not what you’d find on the huge stock sites but rather something special and different and your targets are those who need and want that kind of work. That work is of a higher value than the depressed prices of big brand (micro)stock. You can’t get it everywhere. Scarcity is gold.

If you are pricing your licenses to compete with Getty or Corbis, you are selling yourself short and committing business suicide. The huge companies can cut volume deals and use other business lines to make up for making parts of a penny on a license. You cannot. Your work thus needs to be better than that and you need to have the guts to price it for its value. If you are pricing to compete with some huge corporation, you are pricing to lose.

If you make work that only you can make, work that is unique in vision, then you simply have no competition.