MYRMECOS

I enjoy the dubious distinction of being the most infringed photographer I know. Every week I send at least a dozen takedown notices to commercial entities using my photographs without permission. I’ve sent one this morning already. My photos end up in youtube commercials, on coupons for pest services, in website banners, in company blog entries, on product labels. If every commercial infringer paid my usual commercial rates, I calculated once, I’d be making a comfortable 6-figure annual salary.

Of course, not every infringer has the budget for my standard rates, and that might explain why they take without paying.

The trouble is that the photography market isn’t a single market. It is several distinct markets- an art market, an editorial market, a microstock web market, and others- each with its own culture and pricing structure. I sell primarily to magazines & textbooks, I sell at market rates (typically $60-$400/image), and I have few if any infringement problems in that market.

My pest images could also be sold in the cheap and fast microstock market. This new arena includes the folks who create local exterminator websites and who are used to paying a few cents to a few dollars for an image. Web designers think $100 for an image is insane, even though publishers routinely pay more than that. I’m not going to price my regular photos down out of the market that sustains me just because web designers trained on microstock think I’m nuts. That’d be professional suicide.

I can, however, run an experiment. What if I take a pile of forgotten, unused photographs and offer web-resolution versions at microstock prices? After all, the images aren’t doing any good gathering dust on my hard drives.

The graphic at the top shows 21 of the most common pest ants in North America, covering the bulk of my infringement headaches at the species level. None of the images appear in my regular galleries. For a variety of reasons they did not make the cut for my high-res work, but as small 400-pixel pictures they’re great for display in a blog post. The whole pest ant composite can be downloaded as a royalty-free stock image for $34.95. This works out to under $2 per ant.

Will anyone license this graphic? Beats me. But it’ll provide insight as to whether infringers take my images because they can’t afford them, or because they’re just very, very bad people*.

Individual ants in the graphic appear at this resolution.

*Kidding! I’m just kidding! Many infringements stem from a widespread misperception that anything on Google is public domain.