One of the hardest elements of strong content strategy to produce with any level of consistency and at a reasonable cost is strong photography. Lefty is trying to change that challenge for brands by offering a simple mechanism to reach out and license Instagram images for use online or off.
Just login to the site at lefty.io, search the feed of Instagram images by topic or hashtag, pick one you like and ask to offer to license the photo. Lefty reaches out to the owner, offers them a fee for use of the image, then, if they agree, you pay $19.90 for the rights to use the image. The owner gets $10 and Lefty gets the rest for the service.
**UPDATE** – Lefty contacted me today (Friday, March 4) with an update on pricing. Soon they are shifting to a “Name Your Own Price” model that will allow buyers to set their own price for the photos they’d like to license (and $0 is an option.) The shift will also include a 15% fee on the transaction and a $10 monthly user fee for under 100 requests. Love 100 requests will warrant a $299 per month charge. So they’re already seeing enough traction to shift into a business model that is more sustainable.
While the site is new, Jeremy Steinberg, Lefty’s marketing lead, told me they historically have seen a positive response rate of around 60 percent. The owner of the image can either get the money from Lefty via PayPal or it can be donated to UNICEF. If the owner says no to the request, the buyer has an opportunity to send a more personalized message which, Steinberg says, increases the response rate by about 30 percent.
The site has been in limited release until recently and has onboard a number of brands as clients. As it continues to grow more and more Instagram users will have the opportunity to monetize their work and more and more brands will have cheaper, easier, if not higher quality, images from which to choose. For brands with an intense social content calendar — posting daily or more — this could be a boon for the content asset budget.
For more, visit lefty.io.