I love that SteemIt rewards people for their posts.
Since people on SteemIt receive rewards, they should become more professional in how they publish.
The SteemIt format encourages people to put an image on each post. It appears that some people just grab images off the Internet. Using another person's creations for personal gain is neither cool nor legal.
Citing the source of an image is not sufficient either. To legally use an image one needs a contract with the image creator.
Contacting creators is time consuming and costly. Long ago, magazines developed an industry called stock photography. They would buy pictures from photographers with a standard contract then use the images to design their magazine.
The Internet lead to the creation of MicroStock web sites sites. These sites would have even larger inventories. The standard price was a dollar per use. I was hoping that the prices would drop with time. But they haven't.
I pulled the image for this post from Big Stock Photo. I added a hideous green background a label at the top of the image.
The entry level plan for BigStock gives its users one free image a month.
Unfortunately, their levels for additional images are high. BSP charges $3.50 for on demand photos. Their entry level subscription is $79 a month. Only a few steemians reach the level of making that much a month.
When you buy an image it is still good form to cite the creator. This image was by Ryzhi.
BSP has a referral program. I joined the referral program and included my referral link in the citation. This way I can see how many people click on my images. The BSP stats page says that I joined BSP in 2005. I've sent them 16,747 hits had 4 sales and made $7.00 in earnings.
I tried selling images through BSP. Unfortunately, their editors have standards. They have rejected most of my entries.
As the transaction cost of Steem is so low. I might start offering Microstock images through my sites. That would be a lot of work. My list of backburning projects seems to grow by the day.
CONCLUSION: Since SteemIt is rewarding us for our content, we should be professional in how we produce content. This means securing the rights for images that we put on posts. Microstock allows people to buy images at a low rate. Transaction costs on SteemIt is so low that it would be easy for people to start selling images directly to other steemians.
