How to Claim Royalties for Your Work Featured on Social Media?
Do you sometimes feel that others are earning more royalties from your work by posting it or about it on Social Media? Are you consciously, intentionally and inadvertently providing content to Bloggers, Vloggers, Tweeters, Influencers, Fashionistas, YouTubers, Trend Riders, Reviewers, Proselytizer without getting a share of any reward? Over the last few years I have been getting more and more questions about how to claim royalties for work featured on social media sites. Some of the main issues raised include books, particularly picture books, being read on social media, images posted as part of reviews book reviews etc. and the general sharing of content with little or no regard, or maybe even understanding or awareness, of its impact on copyright and/or royalties.
Recommended Reading : How to Create a Register of All Your Published Works, from Scratch
For all creators of the written word and/or visual art you can currently register your work thought several collecting societies such as Public Lending Rights (PLR), Designers and Artists Collecting Society (DACS) Payback, Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) to claim royalties for secondary use etc. However, the ability to claim for work posted onto social media is still leaves too much to the imagination and is very hazy to say the least, depending on which society you can register with, how you interpret their guidance, and whether they make payments for online content at all.
Don’t get Technical about it!
If you wanted to get technical about it naturally you can. Personally I honestly do not have any intensions of going down this route. To me when one of my books is read online or images are used on posts etc, I see it as quite a complement and free advertising or promotion of me and my work. Provided that is, they are not claiming that the work is theirs or that they own the copyright. I agree that technically reading a book online without the correct permissions from the publisher, etc., especially if the account is monetarised, or using any images without the required permission from the copyright owner etc. is a breach of Copyright Law. The problem is you could spend more time and effort trying to get posts taken down and would achieve the notoriety of a troll scrooge grumpy bump! ….. I’d rather not.
During COVID many publishers issued guidance for online book reading recognising the need to be flexible during very difficult times for everyone. Looking back at the guidance it was already out of step with social media reality, which is a big oxymoron! by at least a decade or more. It did, however, open my eyes to a long brewing issue that I was completely unware of.
For an example of guidance given during COVID please click here.
Why can’t Illustrators, Authors and the like, be Treated like Musicians are?
The music industry seems to have already had this battle with social media and now able to check for Copyright ownership allowing artists to claim royalties when their music is used for a video or a reel etc. What illustrators, authors, cartoonists, photographers, painters, designers, or any other type of visual artists and publications contributors such as translators etc. need is for a similar system to be introduced for their work too.
My Understanding of The Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) Vew.
Looking at information available on ALCS’s website they are not currently making any payments to ALCS members for their contributions to websites and blogs. They don’t as yet have any agreed way of making payment to members for their website and blog content.
At the moment ALCS’s aim is to collect as much information from their members as possible about the online content they write with a view to making payments at some point in the future when they know enough to develop appropriate payment methodology.
At the moment there is no direct mention of other social media channels nor third party use of author’s work on social media. There is, however, some guidance on what to tell ALCS about any sites that include content on them that you have written and are credited for.
In the members area of the ALCS website there is a separate ‘tab’ for adding these types of works in the works section in the form of a Uniform Resource Locator (yes that is what URL stands for!). However, the guidance is when you’re submitting the URL, to make sure you include the full URL, so include http:// or https:// along with the title of the piece you have written. Does this mean each time say a book is read online you have to capture the unique URL for that reading? It’s not that clear to me which makes me think yes you do!
For more details please following the link to the ALCS webpage on Website and Blogs ALCS | Websites and blogs.
My Interpretation of the Designers and Artists Collecting Society (DACS) View.
Fortunately DACS’s website guidance is a little more clear but still open to interpretation. Through DACS you can add website URLs in part 1 of your DACS Payback claim. All you need to submit is the main website address, not the specific page your image features on. For example, dacs.org.uk, and not https://www.dacs.org.uk/for-artists/payback/frequently-asked-questions. If you have more than one image on a particular website, then you need to claim as you would for a magazine, with the total number of images claimed for on one URL.
How is this open to interpretation? I’ll explain now ….. If I look at YouTube as an example, I have posted over 60 videos of myself illustrating various picture books and have had picture books that I have illustrated read out more than 500 times dating back to 2011. This equates to approximately 12500 of my images appearing on YouTube. My interpretation of the guidance that DACS has provided is that I simply add one line to my claim with the main website address, https://www.youtube.com/ , followed by the total number of images, 12500. If my interpretation is correct then I can simply do the same for each and every website, blog, social media platform I am aware that my work appears on. You may have noticed that I have used the word simply a few times …. Entering a line on your submission is simple but getting to that line is not so simple. How do you add up all your images on social media? Let alone keep a record of them all?
It Wasn’t Me?
If you have read some of my other articles on how to maximise your income as an illustrator author etc. then you will already know that I am very lucky that my husband, now working with me as my PA (always read the fine print of every contract you sign not forgetting that a wedding is a contract of marriage too!), has been doing all this for me for the last few years. As a fully qualified Chartered Engineer and Project Manager he is a spreadsheet psychopath and has created a register of not only all my ISBNs and ISSNs need for registering my work with collecting societies, he has also made a register of every YouTube or TikTok URL of my books being read. The fool has also already started recording any social media posts using my work that he can find. It’s an endless impossible task that desperately needs to change to be more like what the music industry has achieved with social media.
Why Should We Bother?
For many working artists, DACS Payback provides some much appreciated additional income. In 2023 DACS paid thousands of artists, illustrators and photographers a share of £5.2 million in royalties. Individual payments were up to £367 for books and magazines and over £2,000 when also claiming for TV.
For me the problem is that the amount of extra effort it takes to make a DACS payback claim that includes all your images on social media, it is almost not worth it. It has to be reflected in the remittance made otherwise it is simply not worth spending the time doing. This would effectively mean letting others basically use your work for no royalty in return, even when they are earning a royalty from social media themselves. You can see why I strongly feel the current status of affairs is in desperate need of overdue substantial change.
For more details please following the link to the DACS frequently asked questions webpage which will tell you more, DACS – Artists – Payback – FAQs
So How Can You Count All the Images?
For social media sites such as YouTube you can start with the obvious searches such as the illustrators name, authors name etc. These searches rely on the person posting actually mentioning you in the post or better still tagging you. From experience most don’t, especially if you don’t have an account on that platform, how can they? After that you can start searches for book title, then title in each language it has been translated to, the names of any main characters and so on. Each time we find a post of YouTube we add it to a playlist created for that search. Once you’ve had enough of searching it is time to add all that you have found to a register and then assign to each the number of images you know are in each book etc, Naturally you can do this whatever way you like, the important thing is to have some sort of system that allows you to know what you have already captured, what you have registered, what you already have included in your claim etc. so you don’t have to do any more work than you already have to.
What Can I Realistically Do Right Now?
As DACS payback part one closes on the 16th February this year, which is just over two weeks away, what I would recommend is to work out how many images on average appear in your books and multiply that number by the number of books you’ve found being read on each social media site so you can at least get something in for this year without going crazy. Yes I know it will not be accurate, then again there are millions of post going up on social media every day making it impossible to know what the accurate actually is.
I’ll say it again, the amount of extra time and effort it takes to make a DACS payback claim that includes all your images on social media, to potentially earn a little bit closer to, or up to £367 is hard to justify. It has to be reflected in the remittance made otherwise it is simply not worth doing. At the same time why should Authors and Visual Artist be expected to let others, who might well be earning a royalty from social media sites, use their work for no royalty in return? We need a system that rewards us all like the music industry does.
A Call To Action.
One thing we can all do is to write to our respective collecting societies to highlight the issue that we are facing and to ask them to take up our grievance with various social media platform providers in the same way as the music industry did. I would even suggest that they open direct talks with the music industry to learn how they achieved this and learn from them.
A Couple of Tips from Experience!
As mentioned earlier when trying to make a record of your work on social media the most important thing is to have is a system where you know which, when searching on YouTube for example, videos you have already counted / captured and which are new. What I do, (well maybe not me but him) is to have two playlists that are private to my account, one called “Not Counted Yet” and the other called “Counted” (it must have taken him weeks to think of what to call them!). The other trick is once you have finished searching for the day then set your playlist to watch all and leave the computer running. This allows you to filter for unwatched when you come back to search again, hence only capturing videos you’ve not seen yet.
My Advice, and it’s Only My Advice!
As things stand this is a pointless waste of anyone’s time given that ALCS are only collecting information and for DACS it’s almost impossible to have an accurate count without spending hours trawling through every social media sites you care to bother with as it is a complete nightmare to capture everything. The financial return is not worth it. My advice is to simply find a way that you are comfortable with to simply estimate how often your work appears to hopefully capture roughly 60 to 80% of everything. Do this once a year and invest your time in lobbying your affiliated collecting society for drastic change.
Where Can I Find Out More?
For more tips on how to maximise your income as an illustrator, author etc. I have written several more articles which can be found here on my website to share my experiences today and hopefully help others as much as reasonably practical please click here.
How to claim royalties for your for featured on Social Media?