Interested in buying or selling photography? Try LicenseStream

For photographers interested in selling their work in the stock market, the internet is a fabulous tool. Many photographers are familiar with options such as iStock but iStock has some serious drawbacks. Photographers have to apply to become a part of the iStock portfolio and iStock prefers photographers with varying content in their portfolios. Also, pricing is controlled largely by iStock, as are the terms of the content licenses: royalty free.

During my recent trip to Photoshop World, I found an alternative service for photographers who specialize in certain subjects, or who want greater control over their content and the licensing process. LicenseStream is an affordable subscription service for photographers that provides them with a platform to host and license their photos from, while maintaining total control of the content. Photographers can set prices for individual types of usage and volume, and there is even the ability to negotiate final price between buyer and seller of content.

Subscriptions start at $39.99/year for basic services and 2GB of storage, with 10% transaction fees on licensing transactions. For users who'd like more control and more storage, a LicenseStream Pro account provides 10GB of storage and more customization options of licensing terms for $99.99/year, as well as discounted transaction fees of 5%. The Pro account also provides some additional marketing of the photographer's work beyond the standard search engine indexing. (LicenseStream primarily markets their images by having them indexed in Google images.)

There may be a trade-off for getting more control of your images. Users of LicenseStream should probably be prepared to do more marketing of their own work than on a more "traditional" internet stock service. However, the payoff for doing this well could be much greater than when marketing the same images through another service, due to the higher royalty fees that LicenseStream can provide.

Specialty markets seem like a great application for this service, such as selling stock images of a photographer's local area to local businesses. In the scrapbook industry it could become a marketplace for the specific kind of stock photography that is useful for magazine cover and trade show layouts.