Is this a silly suggestion or what does anyone think?

I just read the PDN article about the price Corbis paid for lost images ($100-$1) And I just thought if they have that many images they don’t really give a rats about how much is an image really worth on the open market?

Is it not possible to perhaps organize a contract which states that a residual payment be made from say the website an image is displayed on by the number of hits that page receives.

if the page carries advertising that is normally how they decide what fee the advertisers pay so if we said OK here is a photo of say Osama Bin Laden being arrested (or something of the sort) then if the news websites were to run it then obviously it would get a huge amount of hits.

Thus the advertisers would be paying premium rates so I don’t know why it wouldn’t be possible to say OK can I please have $0.025 everytime the image gets a hit.

Obviously it would take a bit of organisation to work out how to register the hits etc, but wouldn’t that change the attitude of those accountants running the media a little bit?

I am looking for alternatives for the old pay a ‘set amount per image’ for a specified territory and copyright, maybe this way you could hopefully do away with the idea that the image would get picked up unlawfully and used illegally.

Is this a dumb idea or perhaps worth thinking about a bit more?