Photoshelter Collection Comes to a Premature End
Saturday, September 13th, 2008
Vincent Laforet comments on a restructuring at Photoshelter: Photoshelter Collection Comes to a Premature End.
For those of you who may be unaware of the PhotoShelter Collection, this venture was a breath of (needed) fresh air in our industry. Their idea was to create one of the best high-quality photography collections out there - and to leverage new technologies in ways that would allow the photographers to keep a lion’s share of the profits from each sale (both commercial and editorial image sales.) Unlike most of their competitors - where getting less than 50% of each sale, and in fact where 30% to less than 5% of the total sale ever finding it’s way back to the photographer is unfortunately not an uncommon result - PhotoShelter made a point of “putting the photographers first” and giving them 70% of each sale. For those of you new to the business - that number is traditionally the amount that goes to the agency NOT the photographer - I just wanted to make that doubly clear.
Photoshelter will continue to provide personal archives for photographers.
Sad… my collection was there, I just move my photos a few days ago from the Collection to the Photoshelter Personal Archive.
Cybergus: Can you tell us what it meant to have your images in the “collection” vs. the personal archive? Did you sell more? Did you get more views? What did it mean to you?