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Lisensing cost for iscrapbook5/16/2023 Will these images be strictly for business to business presentations? Will they be used for local flyers? Maybe they will be used in a full page ad for a national magazine? Whatever the case may be, you need to sit down with the client, and ask them rather bluntly the full details of their intended usage. The first thing you need to do is ask your client what the intended use of the images will be. If instead you leave the creative fee as a fixed rate, and modify your license fee and usage rights to suit the client, you can come up with an estimate that has some method to it as opposed to being drawn up from thin air. That is a terrible practice because you are basing your entire estimate on price gouging. You will bill for them separately from your creative fee and production charges, thus being able to charge for the exact exposure the project will receive, as opposed to raising your creative fee from client to client in an attempt to see what your client is currently worth. Once you know where and how the images will be used these will become the terms of your license agreement. The Fortune 500 company on the other hand might need to place your image in a TV spot, hundreds of billboards, international magazines, and on packaging. The local company might only need your images for a couple thousand flyers, some local newspapers, and one billboard. Through the license you will be able to define the terms of usage for each company, and cater the scale of the project to their individual needs. There has to be a way for us to scale our invoices. If both companies needed a picture of a shoe, clearly one of them stands to profit quite a bit more using the exact same image. The local retailer might use your images to generate $100,000 worth of revenue each year, whereas the Fortune 500 company might use it to generate tens of millions in revenue. If you have a day rate of $2000, then that is the creative fee you will quote to small local retailers as well as to Fortune 500 companies.Īs you can imagine though, a Fortune 500 company will have far more use for your images then a local retailer. Your time should not be worth more for certain clients as opposed to others. It wouldn’t make sense to try and raise your creative fee to scale your invoices because the creative fee, as we discussed in the previous article, is based upon how much your time is worth. Your license will be a crucial part of your commercial invoice because it allows you to scale your invoices based on the type of projects you receive. The license is your ticket to a safe and prosperous long term business relationship. To protect yourself and your clients from possible disputes simply draft up a license that both parties can feel good about. Nike later rewarded the creator with shares of its company however not all clients will be this giving. Since there was not a license in place the creator of the logo was not entitled to any royalties resulting from the massive growth of the company which resulted in her creation being one of the world’s most recognizable logos. At the time Nike was in its infancy and the creator had no reason to believe the company would be worth anything, much less, stay in business. The creator of the Nike swoosh logo was originally paid just $35 for her creation. One famous example that shows the power of a license is that of the Nike logo. Without a license, the client is completely free to interpret the usage rights however they wish and this can lead to some rather unpleasant situations. Issuing your clients a license allows you to “rent” your images for their specific needs. However, because each client is so unique and has such varying demands for your images, we can’t possibly rely on your fixed rate creative fee to cover all these variable possibilities. Sure the client pays you for your time to create the vision and that is what your creative fee covers. When you give your images to a commercial client, you are not selling your images to them, but rather, renting. When you create a commercial image, or any image for that matter, you as the creator are always the copyright holder. It might help if you think of the license as a lease and the usage rights as the terms of that lease. The license is an agreement between you the photographer and the client as to the usage rights that have been granted for a given project. To date you've learned about why it is important to price your work, how to invoice your clients for costs associated with your production, how to find out what you are worth, and now today let us talk about your license fee.
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