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Earn 100-percent commission on stock photos? VideoBlocks says yes

Hillary K. Grigonis
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VideoBlocks
The VideoBlocks 100-percent commission marketplace is opening up to still photographers. Today, VideoBlocks announced the upcoming launch of a Photo Marketplace that will bring the platform’s mix of subscription and per-piece video sales to photographs.

VideoBlocks, a subscription-based stock video platform that allows unlimited downloads for subscribers, launched a separate pay-per-piece marketplace in 2015. The Video Marketplace, which offers discounts to subscribers, pays the videos creator a 100-percent commission and to date, the program has paid out over $6 million to its contributors.

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The new Photo Marketplace brings the same structure to the company’s sister site, graphicstock.com. The platform will continue offering unlimited downloads to subscribers from the main image base, but images in the Marketplace will be sold individually for $10, or $4 for subscribing members. Like VideoBlocks, photographers selling in the Photo Marketplace will keep 100 percent of the commissions from the sale.

VideoBlocks CEO TJ Leonard said the team talked to customers while exploring the prospect of adapting the structure of the Video Marketplace to photo and identified two areas where the new platform had potential to stand out. “First, no one likes image credits and image bundles — and no one likes to dig out a calculator to see how much an image really is,” he said. “The other irritation that members shared with us is that if you are getting an affordable image, you have to sacrifice quality with a web resolution or smaller format.”

The Photo Market Place will use a single price scale for images with a flat rate for non-members and a discount for subscribers and all downloads will be high resolution. Images are both on-demand and royalty free with unlimited digital distribution rights and print runs up to 100,000 (or up to 500,000 for premium plan users).

Beginning today, photographers can submit an application and images for the marketplace at contribute.videoblocks.com. After about four to six months to develop a large image database and review submitted portfolios, those photos will begin selling through graphicstock.com.

VideoBlocks caters to what the firm calls the “mass creative class” or freelancers, small businesses, and creative professionals who need access to media assets but don’t have a big business budget. Visual content use has grown 130 percent year over year, Leonard says, and the new Photo Marketplace will cater to that growth. On the video side, the company recently celebrated its 100-millionth download and expects to have amassed a six million clip library by the end of the year.

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