Professional photographers have taken a financial beating in the print media downturn. Assignments are drying up, rates are plummeting and one’s archive images are no longer a reliable source of licensing income due to Creative Commons and stock photography sites.

But journalists and creatives are rethinking revenue streams. Two innovative platforms, Emphas.is and Flattr have arrived on the scene to help fund photojournalists’ work. Both platforms connect creator and consumer, providing feel-good empowerment to consumers and monetary support for creators.

Flattr

Flattr, in beta-testing, is a social micropayment platform. Web-users (for the purposes of this article, we’ll call them ‘consumers’) establish and fund a Flattr account with a monthly fee. Throughout each month, consumers reward content creators by clicking Flattr buttons positioned aside unique content.

Every month, the user’s flat-rate monthly fee is dispersed among the “Flattred” content-creators. Think of the Flattr button as a Facebook “Like” button backed up by hard cash.

Belgian photojournalist, Tomas van Houtryve is a willing guinea pigs for Flattr’s beta testing. He added a Flattr button to Secrets and Lies, his North Korea photo essay. Between Aug. 6 and Sept. 6, van Houtryve received 33 Flattrs.

Every Flattr is worth a different amount depending on how many Flattr buttons the user has clicked in a given month; as Flattr clicks go up, the amounts dispersed for each click go down.

For van Houtryve, 33 Flattrs amounted to 17.26 Euros, at an average of 0.52 Euros per Flattr.

“My North Korea photo essay had 1175 page views,” says van Houtryve on his blog, “If I am doing the math correctly, that means that I had one Flattr for every 36 page views.”

“Since Flattr is still in public beta, the crowd that has signed up remains fairly limited,” continues van Houtryve, “Most of those registered seem to be from Germany, Sweden, and the computer programing world – basically from word-of-mouth and the viral marketing coming from the creators of Flattr. If a larger audience of photography enthusiasts joins, the number of Flattrs per page view should start rising.”

Flattr buttons can be embedded anywhere on the web; van Houtryve contacted a handful of photography websites that had promoted Secrets and Lies in the past and supplied them with the two lines of HTML code for his Flattr button. We’ve added one below, too. Easy.

An attendant stands near the tracks as a metro train arrives in the station in the subway of Pyongyang, North Korea, on Aug. 20, 2007. From the series 'Secrets and Lies' © Tomas Van Houtryve/VII Photo

Emphas.is

Emphas.is, to launch early 2011, is a photojournalism crowdfunding platform. Emphas.is will solicit proposals from photojournalists, run them through a selection process, back the strongest and push them into the public sphere for financial support.

“Photography enthusiasts are only part of Emphas.is’ potential reach,” say Emphas.is founders Tina Ahrens and Karim Ben Khelifa on their website, “People who care about the issues addressed by a photojournalist’s work are another untapped audience. Crowd funding has already proven successful in other areas, and we believe photojournalism has a large and enthusiastic following that would be willing to contribute financially when given the right incentive.”

Effective crowd funding rests on a wider application of the idea of ownership, and upon sustained and attentive relationships between creators and funders. Ahrens and Ben Khelifa incentivize funders by offering “exclusive access to top photojournalists carefully selected by a board of reviewers composed of industry professionals.” Initially, photographs will be available only to funders, but photographers will be free to distribute them as they please. Emphas.is will never own the photographs.

The incentive Ahrens and Ben Khelifa envision is intimate access to photographers’ adventures and images.

“Funders will share a private communication platform with the photojournalist as he/she travels and works in real time,” says Ben Khelifa via email, “This brings a few new innovative steps to journalism, transparency being one of them. Instead of reading a great piece in TIME, with Emphas.is, you will understand the thought [and work] process before the piece is actually published. Emphas.is empowers the public to become the gatekeepers of the news.”

Emphas.is develops the model for crowd funded journalism pioneered by non-profits such as Spot.Us by applying it specifically to photojournalism. Dave Cohn, founder of Spot.Us, welcomes the fine tuning.

“Having worked with photographers I’ve realized they view themselves as a different kind of reporter/journalist,” says Cohn, “Their craft is defined very much by their medium, and so too is their business model. Somebody can easily just use a sentence or two and link to a text article or embed a video, [but] photos are a totally different beast.”

Photographers unique problems in the digital age are seen in their lack of control once images are published to the web. A photograph can be misrepresented by caption or surrounding content; not a problem that exists for video. Sites such as Vimeo or Youtube allow creators of video content to turn the embed function on or off at will.

“[Emphas.is] needs to get right the presentation and ease of use for the public,” says Cohn, “While I understand the need to make the content scarce, it’s a fine line to walk between making your content enticing and hoarding.”

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Clearly Flattr and Emphas.is are a long way from providing monies comparable to living wages. but they have the potential to compliment the generalist approaches journalists and creatives may adopt in the future.

What do you think? How do you see these new direct-funding methods changing the financial landscape for photogs?

Tajiks gather at the airport in Dushanbe to greet and honor friends and family returning on charter flights from Hajj. © Carolyn Drake. Carolyn Drake is one of several award winning photographers endorsing Emphas.is.

Authors: Pete Brook

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