In the old days, photographers priced their photography based on its type of usage. Generally speaking, editorial has the lowest price, public relations and corporate have a mid-range price and advertising has the highest price.
This worked quite well for 45 years or so. Then someone invented Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.
With social media, the line between editorial, corporate and advertising can be nearly invisible. When a company publishes pictures on Facebook et al., is that editorial, public relations or advertising?
Every type of business communication is a form of marketing. At the very least, social media should be considered public relations rather than pure editorial even though it may use an editorial style of photography.
A year ago, Suzanne Sease wrote about pricing photography for social media.
…clients [use] the free venues (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, Vine, YouTube to name a few) to promote their brand. Because these venues are free, clients sometimes put little value in paying for images.
This is the number one obstacle photographers have to overcome. It’s not just clients who place little value in photos used on social media, it’s also photographers themselves.
Some of the numbers mentioned by Sease in her article:
On the high end, [the photographers] got around $8,000 for 6 shots in 1 day of shooting. On the low end was $650 for one image/unlimited usage. (…) On the average shoot, the client wants up to 25 images with social media use only for around $5,000.
A Creative Director at a social media ad agency said they would pay $500.00 for a one image shoot (…) And for shoots when they need 15-25 images in one day, their client pays $2,000 max.
In broad terms, these numbers are: $80/image (low-end, volume shoot); $200–$650/image (mid-range); about $1300/image (low volume, high-end shoot). Again, the usage is strictly social media.
If you allow for the typical(?) 10% to 20% reduction for the Canadian market, those US numbers are not far off.
In the past year in Toronto, I’ve charged:
• $400 for one picture used on Twitter and Facebook by a small non-profit group.
• $450 for one picture used on Twitter by a small government agency.
• $600 for two pictures used on a car manufacturer’s Twitter account.
• $1,800 for 22 pictures (a volume shoot from an event) used on a company’s Facebook and Twitter accounts.
These numbers boil down to: $80/image for a one-day volume shoot; $300–$450/image for a no volume, relatively quick shoot.
Of course, you should not price only on a per image basis. You have to factor in the nature of the shoot as well. My examples were simple, available-light shoots and the images were used once on social media.
When a photo is published on social media, it can be “shared” by anyone and everyone. Certainly that’s often what the client might want. But a photographer has to keep that in mind when pricing.
A photographer should never price their work based on square inches or number of pixels. You’re not selling space. A picture used on social media can have a much larger reach than a photo used on a corporate web site, in a brochure or on a series of billboards.
Just because it’s free to use Facebook, Twitter etc., that doesn’t mean the pictures should be free. Just because most social media are viewed on small handheld devices, that doesn’t mean the photos have a small value.
