DEVON, I gotta say that you discuss this stuff well and intelligently (ditto with APPLY), but you do leave room for argument and discussion.
I have no idea what a bodybuilder is paid for a cover shot now-a-days but my first guess would be nada or ... nothing at all.
I guess I make the above assumption for the following reason.
At one time Mike Menzer was a good friend of mine and we had a four to five hour discussion about the world of bodybuilding and one of the topics we talked about was, "How much do the bodybuilders get paid for the use of their photos in the magazines?" (It could have have been for 'photos' and/or 'articles' which some of the guys never did actually write.)
At this time Mike's photos were used in just about every issue and one day he visited Joe's office and asker to be compensated for that fact.
Joe, being the business-man that he was, ended up not paying Mike but instead he offered Mike a full page ad in the magazine in which Mike could sell a small training booklet that Mike, himself, would have to put together.
Mike ended up sort of agreeing and got to work putting a small training booklet together and a few month's later he went to the post office to see if he had any mail only to find a note to report to the P.O. front desk.
He left that post office with three(?) bags full of mail with checks enclosed for his training booklet and that single day was the day that convinced him that bodybuilding was a profitable venture.
(Any GetBigger still got one of those?)
Sorry ... Just a little b it of history there.
So to the best of my knowledge ... bodybuilders were not paid for the use of their photos back then simply because the fact that those photos were published in a national magazine was 'pay' enough.
And as far as I know ... Mike was the first bodybuilder who benefited financially as a result of the free ad offered by Weider.
I could be wrong in the above statement and it would be interesting to hear if anyone knows another version of the 'facts'.
It would also be interesting to know when Mr Weider started offering financial contracts and who received them.
I have heard that there were a few $40,000/year contracts but those discussions have been long forgotten so that figure may not be accurate.
But I do recall situations where Guest Posers made NPC contest apperances free of charge (excluding air-fare and acommodations) providing that the Weider logo was placed on the poster as a sponsor.
These Guest Posers were under contract with the Weider organization, but I have no idea if such Weidert contracts exist today or who's involved or what the pay is.
