MicrostockInsider - News

December 2011 Microstock News

Steve Gibson — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 04:46:12 +0000

Well the holiday season certainly does compress time doesn't it!

Sadly it I fear that my planned in depth review of the microstockexpo has been a casualty, although a draft post is well under way, I don't think it's going to see the light of day in a reasonably timely manner. To encapsulate it in a nutshell - it was an excellent event, you can watch the videos on the website, and like any conference most of what I learned (and most of the value) was from conversations outside of the organized sessions. Again, thanks to all those who I met who shared their insights with me.

The (New) Istockphoto Referral Program

last month istock announced some changes to their referral program, some rather inconvenient ones. After several weeks of chewing over this I still can't work out what on earth they are thinking...

First point to make clear is that the new program is much better than the old one, (I feel the old one was little more than lip service so that's little consolation)

The new referral scheme offers users a choice of 20 credits, a flat referral fee of $20 or a 20% cut of the first sale of referred buyers with 30 day cookie length. This replaces the previous offer of a flat $10 for referred buyers.

Inconveniently after accepting the new referral program the old referral links no longer operate. I can't see a good reason why the old links could not remain in operation (with the old $10 referral if that's easier).

To confuse the situation istock are also offering an affiliate program via link connector (which I joined earlier in the year) this offers a similar 20% rate for new buyers and also 10% for existing buyers.

I then received a message from istock:

"The Affiliate acknowledges and agrees that, with respect to the promoting of iStockphoto's Services and/or iStockphoto's Site through LinkConnector, the Affiliate may not also: i) be a member of any referral program operated independently by iStockphoto, ii) promote iStockphoto through any affiliate marketing network other than LinkConnector, or iii) be part of or a member of any other organization or entity that agrees to pay, give, distribute, reward or otherwise provide any kind of benefit, in any manner whatsoever, for promoting iStockphoto's Services and/or iStockphoto's Site."

I asked istock why this was:

"Both the affiliate and referral programs are available to any partner wishing to promote iStockphoto. However, we've made a business decision to not pay the same partner more than once for a single sale. We needed to update our terms and conditions both on the affiliate and referral programs to reflect this policy and then leave the choice up to you. Since you are currently enrolled in both programs, you will have 30 days to choose which program to continue promoting iStockphoto by updating your links to those available for that program."

I thought this reply was more of a brush off than an answer. "we've made a business decision". It would be easy to believe that it might be because there is a risk of a double payout. But unless I'm mistaken, if two different sites send a buyer to istock using referral or affiliate links, only one gets paid (usually the most recent to send overwrites the cookie).

The whole thing makes me think of the response I wrote to someones comment about istock earlier in the month: "partially paralyzed by what seems like an internal morass of 'big business'".

To sum up the new programs:

Referral Program (on istockphoto)
New Customer = $20, 20 credits or 20% of the sale

Affiliate Program (link connector)
New Customer = 20% of the sale
Existing Customer = 10% of the sale.

Almost everyone I have met feels that the old istock program was the worst in the industry, most refusing to ever use the links due to the conversion rate.

Over the past couple of years there has been much debate about exactly how much (if any) istock is loosing ground to it's competitors (the results of any one individual always being conveniently obfuscated by differences in exclusives and non-exclusive earnings). Implementing a new referral program to try and match the competition (one that people might actually want to use) is one of the clearest signs of seen so far confirming this. I'm certainly not convinced that buyers will be persuaded, if istock is loosing buyers (perhaps deservedly so) more advertising will bring them back but is not guaranteed to make them stay. Their own sponsored own surveys have shown that most of their customers buy from multiple agencies and have little loyalty.

News from other Agencies

123rf announced they are accepting footage submissions. According to a press release they have approximately 30,000 videos their database and are planning to launch the collection to buyers in January 2012.

Stockfresh published some leaderboards of contributors http://stockfresh.com/artists

Panthermedia announced a relaunch offering 13 million images, 40,000 contributors.

Deposit photos reached 5 million images, adding 1 million in the last three months. Their press release went on to tell us that Yuri has uploaded is latest collection of 17,000 premium microstock images to their site. By virtue of upload so may images Yuri holds the honor of adding the 5 millionth image. Impressive stuff for a agency launched in 2009.

Deposit photos also launched a tax centre to match most of the other major agencies and also announced it was accepting editorial images.

Photodune increased commissions for non-exclusive artists, increasing from 25% up to 33%.

Blog Highlights

Power of the crowd on microstockposts

2011 review infographic from picniche

My Experience creating an industry conference from microstockdiaries

Licensing images in today's market on the microstockgroup blog

Monthly marketplace sales record from envato

2011 Wrap Up

Two things stand out in microstock for me over the past year:

First, the continued homogenisation on the industry. (shutterstock on demand v. veer subscription, and almost everyone offering video, editorial etc). It seems this will move ever further with sites like envato/photodune offering a single place to download a wide range of creative related digital products. The playing field among the big 3/4 microstock agencies seems more level than it ever was.

Second was the contrast in the ways that agencies are managing their 'crowds' of contributors and communicating with them. The larger agencies feel ever more distant. This might be because of an influx of 'new' agencies (deposit photos and others) who, perhaps by virtue of being smaller at present feel 'friendly'. This was for me highlighted in the various pieces of 'bad news' announced over the past 18 months, istock and their commission structure contrasted with veer and their introduction of subscriptions. Both handled in different ways. It might be a little unfair of me to compare the two; one was hard-face profiteering, the other was just plain stupidity(?) and that might account for the differences in response.

It's a little like communist dictators facing civil unrest, either send in the troops and stamp it out callously; or risk showing some weakness and back down to maintain order; essentially the agencies are stuck between a rock and a hard place, and once the crowd gets militant there is little anyone can do to stop it.

If an agency is at the edge of a cliff, then taking a step too far means there is no easy way to take step back...

Wishing you all a creative and fruitful 2012 - Steve.

Oct/Nov 2011 Microstock News Update

Steve Gibson — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 12:05:02 +0000

Quite a bit has happened since I last wrote, two conferences and a few changes to royalties and pricing at some agencies.

Probably the big event for me was the microstockexpo which took place last weekend in Berlin, I'd like to thank everyone I meet and all those who made it possible - you know who you are! A full report is comming soon!

Crestock have anounced a tiered commission structure, the previous offer was 20% then 30% after 100 downloads. The new pricing is 20-40% as per the table below:

This change brings crestock inline with the big 4 agencies who all operate some form of tiered royalty structure (comparison of royalties across all agencies). Crestock also announced that images from their collection would be available via masterfile.com, photographers will earn their same commission rate on masterfile sales i.e. 20-40% of sale.

Microstockdiaries reported on the stock in russia event which took place in at the end of September - just after my last post.

istockphoto launched feast, it all looks exciting (and dare I say a little bit 'veer'). It remains to be seen what actually happens, istockphoto have a strong tradition of teaching and empowering contributors through their various 'lypses. I'm a strong beiever in mentoring. Although istock state feast is for all types of creative it appears to be predominantly for image buyers.

Shutterstock launched their new catalog tool which you can use to monitor groups of photos, create custom lightboxes and landing pages to drive traffic to. Sutterstock also launched a great looking ipad app. The app is for viewing and organising only, you can later downoad via a computer from a shutterstock account)

Stockfesh anounced they had reached 1 million images.

Depositphotos announced a change to their pricing structure to further reward their top photographers (they already have tiered commission rates). Pricing of images now varies with their photographer levels as per the table below:

Deposit photos rankings are based on total number of sales by photographer, bronze 500+, silver 5000+ platinum 150,000+. See Details.

Deposit photos also announced that their SMS payment option would be available in more countries including Panama, Hong Kong and New Zealand, with Italy to be added soon (presumably that's assuming that Italy has not drowned in Euro debit)

Other posts that caught my eye:

The picniche blog took a look at a mature microstock industry with some interesting youtube video presentations.

Microstockposts took in a preview of the stock performer analytics tool.

Mystockphoto took a look at the changes to depositphotos pay-as-you-go pricing.

Sales have tanked - a rather epic thread on microstockgroup that was weaved it's way through some interesting (and not so interesting) issues.

Microstock Photographer Capability Model

Steve Gibson — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 10:43:59 +0000

Since being asked to moderate a panel at microstockexpo on workflow, I've been looking at more detail into what workflow means to different photographers. Workflow is essentially just business process, you perhaps can describe workflow as everything you do from image idea to image being for sale.

As a photographer you probably operate on a series of interwoven processes - weather you think it or not. some processes are simple for a small business and done without thinking (and often don't need a formal process to be conceptualized). Procurement of new equipment, learning new skills, even quality control are often done through 'experience' without too much thought to what is actually taking place.

So why do some photographers seem to instinctively understand how to be successful while others diligently pour hours of work and creativity into making just enough money to 'get by'? There is a huge gap between selling microstock images and being successful at microstock.

When you start looking into workflow processes you soon realise what a broad subject it actually is, it's quite easy to apply to all parts of business not just tasks that are immediately associated with producing images.

Workflow Levels

The model I've presented below is loosely based on the CMMI model from Carnegie Mellon University, but you could apply one of numerous other business process systems (lean business / six sigma, ISO QA etc,) to your microstock work. This is not an actual business methodology to implement, but a series of levels you can measure yourself against. The processes you setup will be custom for your particular situation. Some time ago I wrote an example worfklow but that only scratches the surface of what is needed. Don't look at this as extra work, doing this correctly will will mean hours of savings and I personally think is a key difference between real success and mediocrity (and eventual failure due to lack on enthusiasm) in microstock.

I've presented this to highlight what I think is one flawed opinion that a lot of photographers share: that the final goal in microstock is taking images that sell regularly.

Level 1 Shooting - Taking photos, not as trivial as it sounds - need camera, internet, computer, capable of basic business administration - this is not a given, if you get rejected when you apply to a microstock agency, or have a high rejection rate this is where you currently are - the bottom: don't blame the agencies or the stiff competition, take a look at what you are doing wrong.

Goal: Baseline

Level 2 Technical Quality - acceptable images, at this level photographers focus on taking images that are technically good enough to be accepted, there is some limited focus on the choice of subjects and marketability, the bulk of microstokers I think are stuck at either this level or somewhere close to the next level. The majority of images generate zero sales in their first few months online.

Goal: 100% acceptance

Level 3 Consistent Selling - by this level the focus falls on producing images that sell consistently, technical aspects of image production are by this point fully under control. Measurement of previous success and failures to guide future subject choices plus analysis of in demand subjects. At this level there is a strong focus on a circular life-cycle of analyze, shoot, process, sell, and measure/react. A lot of microstockers feel that they are 'there' at this level: I think they're wrong.

Goal: 100% of images sell regularly.

Level 4 - Scaling and Profit, optimizing your work-flow to allow business to be efficiently scaled through outsourcing if needed. Management of costs to ensure that each photo is cost effective and can generate not just a profit but enough profit to continue to grow the business as needed. You can still operate as an individual at this level, but have a realistic understanding of equipment costs and the value of your time. Processes and responsibilities are defined in writing so that changes to any outsourced work can be efficiently communicated to another 3rd party company.

Goal: 100% of images recoup production costs, aggregate sales cover all business costs with some limited scope for investment.

Level 5 - Continuous Process Improvement, at this level the business is constantly on the lookout for new opportunities, investing in not just new equipment and training as need but also managing the current process efficiently. Monitoring and changing the process as and where needed to react to failures and external forces. Collaboration opportunities and (..I hate myself for actually writing this...) synergies are used to pool and build on strengths of related content creators and agencies.

Goal: Changes in the marketplace and technology are efficiently dealt with, minimal waste in production and supervision processes; investigation, analysis and reaction to current and future market changes.

I realise that there are people that take offense at the suggestion that 100% of images should turn a profit, it's perhaps more an idealistic target than something that is achievable. I also imagine there are plenty of photographers who are happy with a status-quo in that they make enough to live on but not grow their business until there is a need for them to earn more (more on that idea in how much can I earn from microstock).

I've got to be full-time to do all this yeah?

No, this is not about being full-time or part-time. I know of several microstockers who work 20 or 25 hours a week, some who outsource shooting, processing and submission leaving them to concentrate on business admin, earning them more than the full-time paid salary. There is no reason that a part time shooter working 10 hours a week can't reach level 4, and I'm faily certain there are people working 60+ hour weeks who are languishing at level 2.

There is only so much time you can save by working efficiently, eventually to scale a microstock business you will need either extra staff or outsource some tasks like keywoding. This can be a difficult step to take, with concerns about quality control and for many a sense that they are letting go of what they current have complete control over. Outsourcing is not always the best option, sometimes are very custom approach is needed, and the only solution to growth would be to employ and train someone in-house.

Hopefully this post will help you think more clearly about your current direction as a stock photographer, and if you have not already done so realize the 'bigger picture' that is a microstock business. What you do and the time you spend impacts on your success and indeed your lifestyle and how much you enjoy your work. The single thought I will leave you with is that it is absolutely not necessary to feel that you have to work alone to make ends meet in microstock - the microstock secret for many photographers is outsourcing to someone who can do some of the work better and at a lower cost.

What level are you at?

Related Posts:

Workflow Index

Outsourcing Microstock Production

September 2011 Microstock Update

Steve Gibson — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 14:14:02 +0000

Digest of Septembers Microstock News Stories:

Two big stories this month relating to the commission and sales structure under which images are sold. Veer announced they were to offer a subscription product, while subscription site shutterstock announced it would to start offering single images.

New Veer Subscriptions

Veer announced a subscription offering available from "later this year" , 30 images per day, prices to be announced but touted as being "less than $250 a month". An updated contributor rate card (pdf) details commissions from subscription downloads which like istockphoto vary with the number of images that end users download per day. If one image is downloaded then the contributor gets $3 commission, if 30 images are download each image contributor gets 1/30 (10 cents per image downloaded). A post on microstockdairies pretty much mirrored my feelings about the new rate... a little too favorable to veer. To opt out of the subscription offer you need to send an email, instructions were sent to all contributors on how to do this, deadline for opting out is 21st October. (read the note below first).

New Shutterstock Single Images

Subscription microstock pioneers shutterstock announced that due to popular demand they would be offering an option to buy single images (they previously offered an 'on demand subscription' that allowed 5 downloads for $49).

The new offer is not available in all markets. Commission rates for single images are as follows:

Contributor Lifetime Earnings	Commission Rate
< $500	20%
$500-3,000	25%
$3000-10,000	28%
> $10.000	30%

Subscription Commission Comparison

(say that three times fast) A quick comparison of the commission rates at shuterstock and istockphoto should help you decide what you think about the new veer subscription offer:

Your pay per download is determined by number of images download by the user in one day: (key values shown)

Downloads	Earnings
1	$3.00
5	$0.60
10	$0.30
30	$0.10

Your pay per download is determined by your total lifetime earnings:

Earnings per Download	Lifetime Earnings
$0.25	Less than $500
$0.33	$500 to $3,000
$0.36	$3,000 to $10,000
$0.38	Over $10,000

Royalty level based on how much of the subscriber's daily limit was used to download your file, with a minimum value of $0.65 according to rate details

Extended License $3.75 at best down to $0.13 at 30 downloads. (So that's as low as 13 cents for unlimited use) IS and SS don't offer extended licenses on their subscriptions. A shutterstock EL will earn you $28, istock ELs work on the same rates as standard image downloads costing from 75 to 125 credits. For me this was the decider on opting out; the potential low subscription payouts I might have swallowed if I could opt-out later (just to see how the sales were and report back on this blog); but $3.75 at best for an EL, No.

Note: At time of posting it appears that veer may be putting together a different structure, a thread on microstockgroup is keeping track of things.

Other News

Cutcaster announced upgrades to their search system and the launch of an API for searching and reselling cutcaster images

Mystockphoto reported on improvements to the despositphotos site

MicrostockPosts featured an article on istocks new terms "opt in or close account ultimatum"

Picniche took a detailed look at which agencies strip your metadata and why.

July-Aug 2011 Microstock News

Steve Gibson — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 04:41:54 +0000

Two months news rolled into one easily managed doobie:

At the Agencies:

The Fotolia website had a makeover, launched a new monthly subscription option and search features including price, category and concept filters.

Depositphotos (re?)launched a campaign looking to attract high volume pro stock photographers with upload incentives (i.e. money) for selected photographers.

Dreamstime announced a new feature to allow contributors to create DMCA takedown notices more easily with a form on their website.

Canstockphoto announced reaching 5 million images, the canstockphoto site also had a makeover, new search and international language sites.

123rf announced it now has 10 million images in their collection, with 100,000 images and illustrations added during the week the 10 millionth image was added.

Cutcaster announced an increase in exclusive commission rates from 1st Sept and a move to a more credit based pricing system inline with other microstock sites while still affording the option to set a price for on-off direct payment download.

Kelly Thompson will be stepping down from his position as head of istockphoto into a new role as Senior Vice President, Product Development for Getty Images. A post on the istock forum has some details and an interesting comparison of istocks grown over the past 6 years. Kelly's post also hints at istock partner resellers/distribution (?). Related post on abouttheimage. iStockphoto also announced that it hired Nicola Ghezzi, as director, country operations in Italy. "Ghezzi will lead iStock’s Milan office and assume responsibility for increasing the company’s presence and mindshare in the Italian market."

Envato launched into microstock with their site photodune. Envato have a history of creating successful user generated content sites like graphicriver and popular blogs aimed at design and creative professionals.

In the Microstock Community

The MicrostockExpo event has been officially announced, aimed at microstock professionals it will take place in Berlin on 5 - 6th November 2011. The conference (to which I have my ticket) offers "unmissable value in education, networking and opportunities, scheduled around three great big parties!". Well known faces from the microstock community and industry are already booked to speak in what looks to be a very interesting program.

Things heated up on the microstockgroup pixmac thread.

Microstockdiaries took a closer look at the new photodune website

I added mykeyworder.com to a growing list of sites offering keyword suggestion tools.

Tyler Olson posted some thoughts on the new shutterstock trends tool.

The picniche blog had a couple of interesting posts including where do independent microstockers submit.

Microstockinsider reviews now track basic details of agencies social marketing presence, for the time being it's just agency twitter and facebook accounts; and also which sites offer API access for reselling and image searches. I've also started listing the number of photographers each agency has if they have published that info.

The results of an istock sponsored survey of graphic designers was published, I posted the pertinent results on our facebook page, It looks like there is not a lot of customer loyalty going on - it would be interesting to answer the question "Designers use multiple microstock sites".

Make your own mind up

Steve Gibson — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 08:27:07 +0000

Decide for yourself from the facts and figures were have collected.
Each of the links below displays tabulated data selected and ordered from each of our site reviews:

June 2011 Microstock News

Steve Gibson — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 23:15:09 +0000

Bigstock announced pay as you go licensing (read: credits not needed, just buy an image when you need it). This is comparable to the offering currently made by pixmac and cutcaster where buyers can pay and download an image without first purchasing credits.

The table below shows the contributor payout rates for the new system, payouts from credit purchases remain unchanged.

	Pay as You Go	Credits (just like before)
Small	$0.90	$0.50
Medium	$1.50	$1.00
Large	$2.70	$2.00
X-Large	$3.90	$3.00
Vector	$3.90	$3.00
Extended License	$29.70	$25.00

Depositphotos announced an auto suggest feature (a bit like the search suggestions in firefox and google) that provides a list of keywords or key phrases in a drop down when you type a few letters into their search box, it also displays matching photographer names so you can try searching "yur" or "mon" to see some well known profiles.

istockphoto introduced a much requested sort by price option finding a convenient middle ground that includes both 2 credit exclusive and 1 credit non exclusive images when set to the cheapest '1 dot option' option.

Microstockposts posted some discussion on istock loosing traffic to shutterstock . Graphs of visitors don't offer insight into the value of those visitors (mirrored in the comment "like comparing an Audi to a Lada") they do show some fairly obvious trends! The traffic situation does seem to mirror some of the results I saw in sales results last month on various blogs; istock might just have shed their lower end customers leaving only their most lucrative ones(?).

Dreamstime launched a twitter tool to announce new uploads and sales to your followers and earn referral revenue from sales.

123rf look set to become the fourth agency to reach 10 million images, launching a competition for a macbook air for the 10,000,000th image. (I think a design-a-poster competition might have also been a good idea.) 123rf also made a change to their upload system to (by default) accept images that were rejected for use as RF into their editorial collection. A checkbox during upload offers "If my submissions are unfit for RF, I agree to allow them to be accepted into the Editorial Section provided they are deemed to be newsworthy." this is designed to stop perfectly good editorial images being rejected and having to be uploaded a second time as editorial only use.

Lookstat launched a comparisons to average tool that compares your sales "performance" to that of the lookstat index allowing you to see if it's just you that is having a bad month or if sales are down in general.

Last month it seems I missed the new keywording tools launched on microstockgroup. The main keywording tool is noting particularly novel, but I really like the oversized keyword buttons to click on; perhaps it's just a tablet style design trend to make everything look like "my first computer" but I imagine that works great on a large touch screen (perhaps bigger than a tablet). There is also a keywords compare tool that allows you to compare two lists of separated keywords and highlight the exclusive and mutual words.

In Other Blogs...

Picniche posted some interesting stats on "Where do independant microstokers submit"

Search upgrades at deposit photos on the microstockgroup blog

Can a Voluntary Code of Conduct Make a Difference in Microstock from microstockdiaries

Microstock for beginners - a roundup of previous posts from niltomill

McComber Photo on exclusivity, shutterstock and istock

May 2011 Microstock Update

Steve Gibson — Tue, 31 May 2011 23:43:34 +0000

A fair amount of this months news comes from istockphoto, the most important being their lunch of photo+ for their non-exclusive members. The system allows contributors to 'promote' a portion of their portfolio (percentage depends on acceptance ratio) to be offered at the same prices as exclusive photographers standard images. It seems at present there is no best match or search engine boost associated with opting photos into photo+ (regardless of discussion on weather this is in istocks best interest to farm high priced sales). Photos are locked into photos plus for 6 months (not sure why). I'm a little hazy on commission rates also with some sellers reporting images sold for 66% more revenue (you would expect 50 or less if the photo was being sold at the same commission rate). The system none-the-less allows you to charge more for your most popular photos in a similar way as dreamstime does automatically, or istock exclusive photographers can already do with "exclusive+". Full details on the istock forum. I can't help but feel that buyers now have an even more mesmerizing array of price points in their search results, the 'filter campaign' (sort price / image collection) lobby group seems to be growing more vocal...

istock announced their planned vetta high end video collection, a list of vetta video requierements are posted in the forum.

istock also started their 'sale' with 20% off their larger size images more on that from sean locke's blog

Continuing the istock theme, a thread on MSG regarding tweaks to best match, particularly interesting are jsnover's charts, changes timed to fall across holiday weekends in US and UK. This presumably tested the revenue from increased sales of higher profit-margin non-exclusive shots vs sales of more expensive lower profit-margin exclusive and premium images.

Yaymiro launched a reseller api offering 50% of revenue from partner sites. Currently three resellers are available including pixmac, each reseller can be opted out individually yaymicro users can control their status at http://yaymicro.com/api-details.action.

Shutterstock darkroom is now showing photographers the keywords that were used to find images that were purchased.

Other things that caught my eye in May:

Interesting that niltomil matt and others have also seen some growth at 123RF.

picniche took a look at tips for the beginning microstock contributor.

crestock image editors comment on blacklists and image acceptance.

Yuri interview on petapixel (from late april).

Microstockdiaries profile of monkey business images

April 2011 Microstock Update

Steve Gibson — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 00:04:55 +0000

Lots of news from Shutterstock this month. Being the first microstock to reach the 15 million image milestone is probably the most impressive news. They also launched a new contributor content editor to simplify image uploading and keywording. Shutterstock also launched a wordpress plugin which will help photographers with wordpress blogs increase their earnings through the shutterstock affiliate program. The plugin can display shutterstock images on your search results page or any page of the blog using a defined search string. More details on shutterbuzz

Getty acquired picscout, details in a press release. So far it seems the focus has been on the buyer plugins and image matching technology, I'm looking forward to a little investment / new features in the photographer back-end of imageexchange.

Veer announced they would be reselling images via partner websites starting with snapfish and Photogenica. Contributors will receive the same commission as if the image had been sold on veer.com

Pond5 announced they had become a one stop shop for both footage and stock images (500,000 images) to their 60,000 sellers and buyers.

Dreamstime launched a new weekly subscription offering, up to 70 level 1 images for $44.99 (10 downloads per day) and also a new limited time exclusive image use options - discussion about that on MSG. A new tier zero image level was added (with a new bronze coloured cinnamon swirl) pushing prices at dreamstime to something close to those of istock.

April Microstock Blog Posts

MicrostockDiaries looked at keeping track of model releases, A future standard for embedding model release data looks like good news for everyone.

On the MicrostockGroup blog Tyler took a look at some tips for speeding up Photoshop.

Yuri showed us how to spend 300k on lighting equipment.

AreanCreative offered some motivational help on overcoming a lack drive.

Close Crop vs Copyspace

I'm planning a post comparing images with lots of copy space to those with a tight crop, exploring if images with copyspace sell less often but for higher revenue because they are more likely to be used in print high-resolution applications instead of low-resolution blog posts. If anyone has any experience with portfolio examples they would like to share then let me know.

February-March 2011 News

Steve Gibson — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 09:07:55 +0000

istockphoto have launched their editorial stock image collection to buyers (previously announced to contributors in December) . Editorial images are highlighted with red/orange image numbers and are subject to stricter license terms than commerical RF images. As stated previously these are not intended to cover recent news or celebrity content, but less timely stock images that feature restricted IP like recognizable designs (cars, logos, buildings, works of art etc) that cannot be made available as royalty free stock.

The albumo microstock site was relaunched after becoming part of the fantero network. The new site features even lower pricing than before, with pretty much the same offer to photographers so far as commission structure is concerned. Like I always say... I'll be monitoring results over the coming months from a photographers perspective, previous results were disappointing. There is still some work to do on the site, specifically FTP is currently only available on request to photographers with large volumes of images.

In Brief:

Dreamstime added a GEO-Tagging feature to their image collection, uploaded images can be tagged from embedded EXIF GPS data or have their location manually set. More about geotagging.

Clustershot avoided the planned closure announced in January, post on techcrunch.

Pixmac want your photos (need?).

Canstock reached 4 million images, Fotolia reached 12 million images.

ImageExchange extended their free click pricing offer untill June 2011.

Panthermedia streamlined their upload process with a new "contributor portal".

Shutterstock anounced an exclusive partnership with the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA)

New in the microstock-blog-o-sphere:

Panthermedia review on microstockdiaries.

Mystockphoto looked at promotion widgets at picworkflow.

istockvideo produces rebel over changes to commission structure - microstockgroup blog.

microstock.me - a place connect with other microstock users

January 2011 Microstock News

Steve Gibson — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 05:44:53 +0000

Fotolia reduced their commission rates. Related news story. Unusually for Fotolia they handled the announcement quite well, letting everyone know with an email. Much better than the recent istock "P.R. gaff" (to put it politely) when they reduced their commission rates. Fotolia also improved their search system adding negative keywords (removal of unwanted subjects) and a recency filter to allow buyers to filter by only the most recently uploaded images. Fotolia announced the launch of Fotolia Korea bringing the total of country specific sites they operate to 14.

Pixmac changed their commission structure. Previous offer of 50% of revenue has been replaced with 30% of gross sale (sounded rather like a pay-cut with positive spin to me, somewhat obscured in a cloud of vagueness) Pixmac then went on to have a "falling out" with Fotolia and Dreamstime (forum post on microstockgroup), shortly followed by 123rf also severing their contract with pixmac as a reseller. On the plus side those with images at pixmac may see an increase in sales due their images been diluted amongst a much smaller image collection; there still seems to be plenty of images available at pixmac.com.

Picworkflow added a keywording feature, where users can bid on a price to pay for keywords to be added to their images. The keywords are crowd sourced, and the highest bid images are driven to the users who provide the best keywords. Full details on the picniche blog

Cutcaster had a makeover, wrapping the site in a much cleaner and simpler interface than previously seen. Various improvements were made including a major overhaul of the search system to improve speed and usability. Cutcaster stated in their press release “Picture buyers don’t need 10 million images, they need the right image" - I think that's a very fair point, we were all fairly happy when microstock sites had 1 or 2 million images a couple of years ago. Another well known site made a real "idogs dinner" out of their search update last month again proving getting search right is not easy. Rarely does a month go by without one of the agencies announcing some new addition or upgrade to their search engine.

Crestock added several more image sizes to their site making a total of 7 sizes priced from $1 to $25 (previously 4 sizes were available).

Clustershot announced their (?) closure - which is a great shame as I had found them a useful place to sell photos to buyers who contacted me directly asking for prices (outside of microstock). I hope someone takes them up on their offer of a buyout. Looking at a post on their blog it does however look like only a handful of photographers were using the platform properly to generate sales, a total of 386 sales earning $8468 (21 of those sales were from me). There is currently a rather fun (morbidly so) series of deathly and sadness related images on the clustershot homepage.

istock announced the arrival of Nick King, as vice president, international. Nick will spearhead the company’s international development and will focus efforts on reaching new customers and markets around the globe. istock has previously been a somewhat North-America-centric agency from a buyers point of view.

What else Caught my Eye ?

AlexH posted a review of 2010 earnings for is micro and macrostock portfolios

Tyler took a first look at the Results of the Microstockgroup 2011 survey.

MicrostockDiaries took a contributors look at evaluting a new agency, and an interesting look at microstock distribution (syndication / reselling).

Lookstat analysed istockphoto search results and found that exclusive photographers are favored 4 to 1.

Fotolia New Commission Rates

Steve Gibson — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 10:29:41 +0000

Fotolia have announced a new commission structure which will come into effect next week. The changes will reduce commission to lower non-exclusive fotolia rank contributors by around 20% (e.g. white rank commission reduced from 25% of sale to 20% of sale). Low ranking exclusive photographers fare even worse dropping from 42% to 35%.

The table below shows the new rates, (hover over the image to show the old rates). Clicking the image currently links to a page at fotolia displaying the new rates before they come into effect.

Fotolia state that the changes are due to the changing market and the need to sustain marketing efforts. "Fotolia continues to maintain photographer commissions at a significantly higher than those of our major competitors, and our increased efforts in marketing will result in an even higher velocity towards increased rankings."

thread on microstockgroup

December 2010 News Update

Steve Gibson — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 02:27:29 +0000

The big news in December for contributors was full launch of photoworkflow.com, we posted a review earlier in the month.

Other than that things were relatively quiet, most of the news coming from various changes at istockphoto. (most of which I'm not going to weigh in on - but the description "Istock F5 epic fail" that has been flying about does not seem all that unfair considering this is supposed to be a leader in the microstock industry.) It's not easy to make changes to a big website without issues cropping up, but sites like google, paypal, amazon etc seem able to do it without all that many "unforeseen" problems. This, I guess, is the price you pay for making the royalty structure complicated.

istock launched their new search, which is supposed to be location aware and feature extra facets to refine your search (like using advanced search but doing it on the fly). Once they got everything working searching for various keywords reveals collections of results I can only describe as fantastic - well rounded mix of results for very generic searches like 'finance'. BUT (and there always a BUT), location support is still not working for me 2 weeks after the launch, a search for finance or money reveals lots of US dollars but no Australian ones (being in Australia I'd kind of expected to see some australian dollars in at least one of the first 200 results). Plus (inexcusably I think), after 2 weeks we still have the old javascript chestnut of clicking in the search box and sometimes either having to manually delete the text "enter keyword(s)" or else mistakenly searching for "enter keywords(S)money" 0 results; surely it's not beyond reason to think that if a search string like that comes in you could strip off the start of it to get to the keywords? or just make your client side scripts work properly in the first place??? Despite all the facets you still can't properly filter non exclusive images as that would in effect allow you to filter by price and for obvious reasons istock don't want to allow buyers to search for the cheapest images. The spelling correction / suggestion feature no longer seems to work(?). It would all be somewhat tedious if the mix of results provided were not so excellent.

istock also announced plans to accept editorial images. A thread on the istock forum details that celebrity and news events are not going to be accepted as they were already available from other Getty sites. This opens the door for street scenes with people, travel images featuring some famous buildings etc that were previously off limits as royalty free. More about editorial images and microstock.

Other News In Brief:

zoonar announced that they intend to grow their partner distribution network from 6 agencies with the aim of having 20-30 resellers. As of 24th December a flat rate of 60% of income from partner sales will be paid to photographers.
A concluding analysis of the 2009 microstock survey was published on the microstockgroup blog.
microstockdiaries published an interesting interview with Masterfile’s President, Steve Pigeon and background info about the Masterfile Crestock acquisition.
Mystockphoto.org posted a digest of social messages about the charity water campaigns started by microstockgroup and shutterstock.

Best wishes for 2011 from microstockinsider.com

Introducing PicWorkflow

Steve Gibson — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 03:59:58 +0000

No sooner had I posted last months news update than I opened my inbox and found a press release for picworkflow, I'm not exactly sure what I was expecting picworkflow to be, but I have to say it was with some delight I found it was a direct replacement to isyndica.

Since isyndica closed my microstock uploads have been somewhat on the backbuner, although prostockmaster is free it does not support all the sites I want to upload to, and my previous FTP tool took a dislike to windows7, only $50 for the latest version, but neither get around the fact that my upload speeds are limited to about 300kbps (reasonable ADSL1 speed) not too slow but it takes at least 30 minutes to upload a handful of good sized images to 15 sites. I'm looking for speed NOT work-arounds.

With my current upload process gone I've been using the opportunity (yes it's been a while without uploads!) trying out a few things including trialing the keywording service at dreamstime. I had planed to cobble together a shell script to run on my own server and ftp to each site in turn from there. Not any more!

So far I've only conducted a little testing, setup 10 sites and uploaded 7 images to each with picworkflow, things look good. I'll modify the review as needed as get more photos uploaded and see how it works in the long term.

Read the full review.

November 2010 Microstock News

Steve Gibson — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 06:18:59 +0000

Dreamstime celebrated their 10 millionth image with a day long 20% discount sale for buyers and 100% commission to contributors. This brings a total of 3 microstock agencies with more than 10 million images in their own collection (so pixmac excluded). 123rf looks like it will be next in line.

In tandem with last months site updates and introduction of $1 images, Crestock relaunched themselves as "Good. Fast. Cheap" at the start of the month. Their previous price levels and site style placed them more towards the premium end of microstock.

PicScout launched a new version of their browser plug-in to help buyers find images. The new plug-in creates a sidebar which allows buyers to easily select which images on a page are available for sale.

Veer limited uploads to 50 images per week.

Shutterstock launched a new version off their contributors home page which features a map of recent sales and then real time image sales by geographic location, and new graphs plotting overall earnings and earnings from new uploads.

Just when I though that the yaymicro marketing department had fallen asleep they launched a new affiliate program, it looks very well thought out and is significantly better than their previous offering of 10 euro cents per download for togs and buyers for 5 years. The new offering is 20% for lifetime of buyers plus 5% second tier earnings from that buyers referrals. You do need to read some of the documentation to get the most, there are several handy features to get referral codes for any page, and finally! thank you yay! for being the first microstock to track the url of the referral and display it in my account. Along with 20% discounts for image buyers they also launched a promotion for bloggers (anyone with a website) to add a banner for 1 year and win.... yes you guessed it, prize of the moment, another ipad.

October 2010 Microstock News

Steve Gibson — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 23:38:23 +0000

Summary of Microstock happenings this October:

DeviantArt.com and Fotolia got together to offer fotoilas image collection to the some 15 million creatives who use deviantArt via a specially themed fotolia sub-domain at stockproject.fotolia.com. This is all part of a plan for deviantArt to grow their own stock image collection, more details on that at stockproject.deviantart.com.

Crestock have been busily updating their site, got themselves a new logo and announced that Ellen Boughn would be contributing to their community blog. They tell us that their advertising budget for the next six months is double Crestock’s annual sales in 2009 "we clearly intend to make a success of this company!". Prices have also changed with the introduction of $1 'XSmall' images, along with reduction in size and price of 'Small' images which are now $3 ('Medium' size is now compatible with what was previously called 'Small', crestocks old 'Small' size was very generous). Pixel-for-pixel the prices seem the same, but there are now more options available. Vectors increased in price from $10 to $15.

Zoonar announced that they have added age fotostock / THP photo services as a distribution partner. Note that you may already have your images represented at age / easyfotostock if you have submitted them to panthermedia.

Moodboard anounced that they were suspending microstock uploads to focus on premium stock content, I reviewed them as 3/10 back in February after struggling to get enough images uploaded and accepted there. As I wrote in the review I like the idea, perhaps it was just the implementation that was wrong - or perhaps it's hard to target a site at both premium and budget buyers simultaneously while remaining credible to both.

Other News in Brief:

Microstockdiares posted a report on the Stock in Russia conference.
Veer announced various new features and enhancements
Shutterstock announced that they have 1.6 million vector images, making them "the webs leading source of vector art"
Pixmac announced improvements to their "search for similar" feature, an example can be found here
Niche microstock agency arcticstock launched a "much improved" version of their website.
Tyler reviewed a new microstock agency with a twist 'isignstock' on the microstockgroup blog.
I wrote a review of PicScout ImageIRC and ImageExchange, It's been a long time in the waiting to get images live in the database since PicScout announced that they were accepting images from individual photographers as well as agencies - results so far are encouraging.

September 2010 Microstock News

Steve Gibson — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 07:50:58 +0000

Updates since the last news post:

Fotolia added 10k of legal coverage to images downloaded from their site, full details of that in their license terms; they also announced they now have 10 million images. Fotolia also made a small change to the prices of images which that have not sold in the past 12 months. The vast majority of fotolia contributors, those photographers with less than 25000 images i.e. 'Emerald level' and below will be unaffected. Those photographers above Emerald level and above will find the priced of their unsold images reduced (if not already set to $1) to fotolias 'best prices' i.e. $1 XS to $10 for XXL. Prices remain at 'best price' until the image has sold 5 times.

Canstockphoto announced they had reached 3 million images and videos.

Pixmac welcomed Simon Raybould as Director of sales and marketing for North America. Simon has previously worked with Getty Images in London, and more recently at Corbis and Veer in Canada. Pixmac also launched at virtual map of sales by geographic location of the buyer - more fun than I useful tool I think (?) but worth a look.

Shutterstock made a press release about their success in social marketing. I'm not about to start counting twitter and facebook followers at each agency just yet, but it does pose the question-- just how much of shutterstocks continuing success is due to their successes social media marketing?

iStock photographer and image inspector Rob Sylvan officially launched his book Taking Stock, "Make money in microstock creating photos that sell". Available (as they so often say) from all good book sellers.

Dreamstime had a nice front-page makeover, now offering 9 million images.

Mostphotos added a subscription option to their site, prices start at $99 per month for 10 web resolution downloads per day.

image and video syndication service isyndica announced they would close on 10th October 2010, The only alternative for the moment being lookstat backoffice, but prostockmaster / pixamba have announced a plans for a similar service to be launched in a few weeks. Also have a look at picniche toolbar or ftp uploads.

zoonar announced that they have added alamy as a distribution partner.

Polylooks announced it would close at the end of the year.

Changes to iStockphoto Royalty Structure

Steve Gibson — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 05:54:39 +0000

istockphoto have announced a restructuring of their royalties to take effect in January next year. There is quite a lot to digest, if you have not already read this post on their site then get a drink and take it all in.

In trying to think of something positive and objective to write, I'm struggling: It is very interesting that it looks like istock is no longer just a microstock site. I know this has become a cliche, but microstock has become, more than ever, 'mainstream'. Just like when Veer (re)launched their marketplace, from 2011 it looks like istock will be a significant seller of macrostock and microstock side by side. Prices are not confirmed, nor are exact details of the images but they will be selling the “agency collection” (Getty) along with a collection of crowd sourced images from their contributors (the current istockphoto collection).

I do hope for the sake of budget conscious buyers that a ‘sort by price’ feature is added, we can never go back to the days of a good sized image for $1, but increasingly over the years I’ve found buying from istock (noted thats only a handful of images per year) has become more and more tedious. My dollar now brings me a just about big enough web-res image after fishing through pages of results sprinkled like a minefield with images that cost $20 for XSmall. There are not many eCommerce sites that don’t allow you to sort by price, or filter out the highest priced collections if they are not in your price range.

15!

I can’t think of anything pleasing to write about non-exclusives royalties dropping to an all time low of 15-20%. These sound like small percentage changes but represent 15% decrease in your income. Exclusives fare better when it comes to royalties but those who have been contributing for many years, it looks to me, will loose out in terms of not reaching a royalty rate that matches their currently canister level rate.

Dangled Carrots are now Moving Goalposts

Canisters have been a feature of istock for many years. There, presumably like every other website that offers such a tally of sales (or other metric) to motivate contributors into uploading more images. More sales will eventually bring you a higher royalty for those sales. This worked well for istock because most users upload images and don’t get past the first or second canister and istock can increase the number of sales needed to reach a canister level at any time. From 2011 Canisters no longer figure in your royalty level, your royalties will be based on the value of the images you sold in the previous year. From one point of view the changes now more fairly factor in value of the sales so you get closer to your next royally level if you sell lots of expensive images. But the motivation for hobbyists (even the serious ones) has now all gone, those that have been slowly working their way towards that next canister are left dead in the water at 15% if they don’t sell 2000 credits worth of images a year.

Community Voice

“Not happy Jan” seems to be what a lot of people think. Call me cynical or just pragmatic, but there is nothing I can do about it. It’s very hard to be sure if this will be a decrease in earnings for me as a non-exclusive, certainly it’s a decrease in royalty per sale. The commission structure was not exactly straight forward before, adding extra terms and complication to it has not helped – perhaps only to obfuscate what has happened.

Even if contributors leave in droves and istock cannibalize themselves, Getty will still be making a pretty penny while they do so. It’s not like there isn’t a track record of cannibalizing agencies. Perhaps istock will one day be included in the long list of agencies who’s home pages now point to getty.com or just resell their images. I've written before that in a few years I don’t think microstock will be ‘microstock’ and that we live in a short/medium term phase were stock images come from two separate streams, eventually that will only be one stream - perhaps with multiple facets.

Opinions on other microstock blogs:

An explanation of Redeemed Credits: mystockphoto.org/istockphoto-contributor-royalties-major-changes

Entertaining post from Matt: niltomil.com/microstock-world/istock-royalty-structure

Funny if you know the industry well: stockphototalk.com/phototalk/2010/09/why-.html

People I've never seen comment came out of the woodwork: microstockgroup.com/istockphoto-com/istock-changing-royalty-structure

And finally, from the same MSG thread… a little smile to end with.

Microstock News Update

Steve Gibson — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 09:13:03 +0000

A couple of big news stories since my last update, the most noticeable one was the F5 update on istockphoto, but for contributors I think the news that prostockmaster is now available free of charge is the biggest story.

ProstockMaster Free-for-all

Prostockmaster was relaunched as freeware, I wrote a review of prostockmaster 2 years ago (needs updating!) while it was still a commercial product with a free option. Prostockmaster is microstock assistant application which helps in the process of keywording and uploading images to microstock agencies. The program supports uploading to 9 different agencies, IPTC keyword setting, image search and can also provide sales statistics. Full details can be found on prostockmaster.com

iStock F5

After months of pecking the F5 key like Homer Simpsons drinking bird, the much awaited new istock website was finally put into action on the 8th August. Within 4 hours you could wade through twelve pages of frivolous 'woots' on the istock forum in response to Kelly Thompsons "we want to hear what you think" to find a few useful comments users had made.

"It's all very nice", but I can't really say I love it or hate it, or for that matter even care that much. I think buyers will like the changes, and that's what matters. Clearly the istock fanclub is strong as ever, I don't think anyone really loves FT, DT et al, but contributors that love istock really are passionate about 'their' site.

The update has all sorts of great features designed to make the buying process easier, and place the spotlight on the images, a nice red download this photo button forms a clear call to action. At present there's bugs to be ironed out, writing this three days after the launch it seems we no longer have the surreal search pages showing only 8 results or "0 search results for <....> displaying 1-50 of 193 matches"... but I still see a fair bit of "0 search results for Entering AND keyword AND (Letter S)". The best things come to those who wait.

To celebrate the launch istock have tabled a 25% discount on credit packages for buyers using the coupon "iLOVEF5" until 15th August 2010.

Other Microstock News

Bigstock anounced their 5 millionth image.

Shutterstock launched shutterbuzz a portal for contributors which features guides, news and user submitted articles related to photographers, illustrators and videographers. Shutterstock also celebrated their 7th birthday with a retrospective post on their blog

Dreamstime announced some accessibility updates to their site - larger thumbnails, updated lightboxes and image page modifications were part of the improvements designed to streamline the buying workflow (press release).

Thinkstock announced that it would be selling images individually, although they are called 'image packs' you can buy a pack of 5 images for $59 dollars and use it over the space of 12 months, this type of arrangement is fairly standard across the microstock industry. Does this put them in competition with istock for customers wanting high resolution images?

picniche toolbar added a share button to automatically add your affiliate code to and shorten the url of any page on a stock agency web site you were viewing, this allows you to promote your own portfolio more easily on a microblogging or social networking service.

yaymicro announced they now have 1,000,000 images in their collection.

Crestock Acquired by Masterfile

Steve Gibson — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 00:39:11 +0000

After some murmurings yesterday about new owners on microstockgroup, an official announcement has now been emailed to current crestock members.

as of 1 July 2010 crestock is now part of the masterfile corporation, masterfile have been in the licensing business for almost 30 years. In the statement they basically outline the fact that they wanted a microstock site and crestock was ripe for the picking.

It's no secret that the microstock business has revolutionized the global stock photo industry and our acquisition of Crestock is a springboard for Masterfile to join the revolution. We believe the combination of Crestock’s community with Masterfile’s commercial experience and resources will be beneficial to both clients and contributors. We can provide clients with quality stock images across all price points and licensing models, and give contributing artists an improved global marketing force for their images.

For at least 6 months it's been obvious that crestock has been 'hibernating' with a skeleton staff, although plenty of sales have been taking place, from a contributors perspective there have been long acceptance delays and virtually no response to support queries. Late last year crestock informally announced they had run out of funding, and were trying their best not to allow this to affect the site.

For the past 9 months I've been patiently waiting with crossed fingers. While my portfolio on there (small as it is) has remained in place and I continued to upload, I voiced my doubts in my review and the lack of payouts and uncertain future forced me to mark them as 'not recommended'. As I understand it there have been no regular payouts for a around a year, just sporadic reports from other members that payouts were coming e.g. "6 months after request" (I assume when there was enough money available). I received a token payout in December 2009 and took it as a good will gesture, hopeful for more to come.

The release promises a brighter future for all crestock contributors with the following promises.

a pledge to try to make all due payouts within the next 2 weeks.
to get through the backlog of unapproved images within 2 months.
to respond to support requests within 24 hours.