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The Royalty-Free Microstock Industry

Established in 2005, 123RF was positioned to be a player in the Royalty-Free microstock industry. Royalty-Free (RF) and Microstock – these are two terms that we need to define when we want to understand the industry that 123RF is in.


123RF Royalty-free Image Audio

What is Royalty-Free?

Royalty-free, or RF, refers to the right to use copyrighted material or intellectual property without the need to pay royalties or license fees for each use or per volume sold, or some time period of use or sales. —Wikipedia

In a nutshell: Anything licensed under a Royalty-Free license allows the user to pay a one time licensing fee and as a result, able to use it many times according to the terms and conditions of the RF license.


123RF Royalty-free Image Vectors

What is Microstock?

Microstock can further be broken down into 2 separate terms which are Micro and Stock. Let’s analyze the term Stock first; Stock in microstock refers to the stock photography industry. Stock photography is the act of producing photographs that are pre-shot for the purpose of licensing them to potential clients. Stock photography is opposed to assignment photography where photographs are produced exclusively and solely for a client.

The term Micro in Microstock refers to the micropayment nature of this segment of stock photography, where clients can legally license a photo from under 1 US Dollar for most commercial purposes.

Our success story? It’s simple. 123RF sells creative content at compellingly low prices. What we might forego in price, we make up for in volume.

123RF Royalty-free Image Video

Crowdsourced Creative Content

123RF has built a robust platform to accept creative content from just about anyone – we’ve positioned ourselves as a creative marketplace where graphic designers, publishers, and AAAA can license content from 123RF’s Contributors. We tirelessly market the 123RF.com site and will represent you and host your content on our servers. So if you are produced, producing or own the copyrights to any of these content, we would love to have you contribute to our stock content library!

These Are The Content Types We Look For:

  1. Stock Photography

  2. Stock Vector Illustrations

  3. Editorial Photography

  4. Stock Audio Sound Effects & Clips

  5. Stock Music Tracks

  6. Stock Audio Logos and Idents

Interested in becoming a contributor? Register with us. If you’re looking to purchase stock content, sign up for a free account today.

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