Microstock News

So what did March 2009 bring to the world of microstocki photography:

Yaymicro anounced a 25% increase in sales during February compared to previous months. The also appointed themselves a new CTO, Oddbjorn Sjogren.

Shutterstock reached 6 million images (actually this was in late February) less than 4 months after announcing they reached 5 million, I’ve almost given up posting individual articles when the big agencies reach a million mark… until 10 million comes! Shutterstock’s Jon Oringer stated that this was "Thanks to more than 144,000 submitters who continue to contribute to our library".

Cutcaster launched support for corporate buyer accounts.

At the start of the month istockphoto reminded us to look at the url bar when we log in to any website and not to enter our passwords into a forum post. The phishing attack on their own forums resulted in the site being taken down and visitors who logged in that day asked to reset their passwords, the whole deal was handled quite professionally.

Pixmac have been actively marketing themselves with awards for uploads and a competition (referral link). I feel they launched their site too early (in november last year), with not enough information about what their plans were. This confusion upset some photographers thinking they might have stolen their images, others have ignored the site assuming they just want to be a reseller for fotolia. The development going on which now sees the site more mature and feature rich, seems to indicate that pixmac genuinely want to create their own collection as well as (perhaps for the time being?) reselling fotolia images. I’ve not written them off just yet.

Getty finally launched their much spun ‘flickr collection‘ with early reviewers reporting around 4000 images being available instead of the 10,000 Getty had planned. Not really microstock news, but something that a lot of photographers with their work on flickr are quite curious about.

Poor old stockxpert, sigh. Since the split with jupitermedia their affiliate program was terminated without notice. Weeks later, as of writing this, broken links are still on their site offering a ‘new’ signup. After stockxperts previous nasty surprise in October last year I’m beginning to wonder what’s happening over there. I’m sure there are staff there who do genuinely care, but are their hands now tied from a long distance with getty tape? With Getty owning two different microstock offerings (IS and SXPi) and also pushing their flicker collection then the mind will wonder…

Back in February, canstockphoto announced their new upload system. I have had time to test it this month and find the system is now far more streamlined with the removal of the need to select categories for each image.

Finally, on a more personal note at the start of the month Crestock (2/15 images approved) accepted more of my images than Shutterstock (1/15 approved) - a somewhat dismal start to the month. Shutterstock did however bounce back to their usual level for later batches with something around 80% acceptance.

Crisis? What Crisis?

It seems to me that the Global Economic Crisis is not having a huge effect on micro stock. At least that’s what I see in my earnings which are relatively stable. There are several factors affecting the microstocki industry at the moment, but at least one of them I think is positive. Although microstock is changing at an increasing pace, it seems to be quite stable compared to the rest of the stock industry which is, at least from the press stories, exploding, crashing and generally turning upside down.

Microstock

Instead of not using stock images at all, I’m guessing that financially constrained buyers are spending on microstock instead of macrostocki, or using more microstock and less macro. Smaller companies and individuals may be forced into using home grown designs instead of hiring professional design, such ‘designers’ are likely to see microstock as the perfect choice.

None of the stock agencies are likely to just jump up and announce they are in trouble. Over the past few weeks there have been various announcements most of them positive, regarding site upgrades and new purchasing options. Crestock sent out a message saying their servers would have some down time because they were upgrading to accommodate increased sales. Yaymicro announced a 25% increase in sales last month. Cutcaster announced support for corporate accounts.

Stockxpert seems to be the only site at the moment need some love, we’ll just have to wait and see what happens there. In recent news (cnet) Bruce Livingston co founder of istockphoto has has stepped down as CEO, but it appears to be for personal reasons and not an indication of any problems there.

Macrostock

Compared to the microstock world, the traditional stock industry appears less buoyant:

Getty recently announced they will lay off 110 (5%) of their employees, with the sales department being hard hit. Jonathan Klein described this as "a result of changes in the imagery business”. Corbis rationalised their workforce last year.

Jupiterimages has fallen from the industry’s third biggest player to, well, who knows? It’s not all doom and gloom, from what I understand juputerimages had big plans, but the market moved to quickly for them to react. With offices closing and online advertising engines seemingly switched off at jupiterimages since the sale, it seems unclear where photos.com, stockxpert and juputerimages are gliding to…

Alamy’s James West sent out a message to contributors opening the debate on a possible subscription model after seeing revenue from newspaper customers drop by 30 to 70 % on last year.

Things in the smaller boutique stock houses seem to be more stable. Is this due to them providing a more personalised service and better suited images?

Future

I have no crystal ball, but I’m certainly planing for microstock to be generating me income well into the future. Spreading earnings across several separate companies is reassuring, some agencies are based in different countries although most are affected by the ups and downs of the US dollar.

I’ll close by presenting a link to photopreneur post about Sadik Demiroz, Sadik was the lucky microstocker who uploaded the six millionth image to shutterstock. From a background of professional photography, his comments about microstock being the "direction the industry is moving" rhyme with those that a lot of microstock photographers have felt for some time.

Crisis? What Crisis?

It seems to me that the Global Economic Crisis is not having a huge effect on micro stock. At least that’s what I see in my earnings which are relatively stable. There are several factors affecting the microstocki industry at the moment, but at least one of them I think is positive. Although microstock is changing at an increasing pace, it seems to be quite stable compared to the rest of the stock industry which is, at least from the press stories, exploding, crashing and generally turning upside down.

Microstock

Instead of not using stock images at all, I’m guessing that financially constrained buyers are spending on microstock instead of macrostocki, or using more microstock and less macro. Smaller companies and individuals may be forced into using home grown designs instead of hiring professional design, such ‘designers’ are likely to see microstock as the perfect choice.

None of the stock agencies are likely to just jump up and announce they are in trouble. Over the past few weeks there have been various announcements most of them positive, regarding site upgrades and new purchasing options. Crestock sent out a message saying their servers would have some down time because they were upgrading to accommodate increased sales. Yaymicro announced a 25% increase in sales last month. Cutcaster announced support for corporate accounts.

Stockxpert seems to be the only site at the moment need some love, we’ll just have to wait and see what happens there. In recent news (cnet) Bruce Livingston co founder of istockphoto has has stepped down as CEO, but it appears to be for personal reasons and not an indication of any problems there.

Macrostock

Compared to the microstock world, the traditional stock industry appears less buoyant:

Getty recently announced they will lay off 110 (5%) of their employees, with the sales department being hard hit. Jonathan Klein described this as "a result of changes in the imagery business”. Corbis rationalised their workforce last year.

Jupiterimages has fallen from the industry’s third biggest player to, well, who knows? It’s not all doom and gloom, from what I understand juputerimages had big plans, but the market moved to quickly for them to react. With offices closing and online advertising engines seemingly switched off at jupiterimages since the sale, it seems unclear where photos.com, stockxpert and juputerimages are gliding to…

Alamy’s James West sent out a message to contributors opening the debate on a possible subscription model after seeing revenue from newspaper customers drop by 30 to 70 % on last year.

Things in the smaller boutique stock houses seem to be more stable. Is this due to them providing a more personalised service and better suited images?

Future

I have no crystal ball, but I’m certainly planing for microstock to be generating me income well into the future. Spreading earnings across several separate companies is reassuring, some agencies are based in different countries although most are affected by the ups and downs of the US dollar.

I’ll close by presenting a link to photopreneur post about Sadik Demiroz, Sadik was the lucky microstocker who uploaded the six millionth image to shutterstock. From a background of professional photography, his comments about microstock being the "direction the industry is moving" rhyme with those that a lot of microstock photographers have felt for some time.

Lookstat is a service that allows you to track sales of your microstocki images across several websites.

Tracking your sales statistics is important, seeing what’s selling and what’s not selling is vital to success in microstock unless you enjoy spending time keywording, sorting and uploading images that earn less money than they cost to produce. You could track sales from each site you use yourself but it’s difficult to compare how each image or collection of images are selling across all the sites you use. Some microstock contributors use spreadsheets to manually tabulate their sale each month.

The lookstat site currently tracks and correlates your sales data from three microstock agencies:

• istockphoto
• dreamstime
• shutterstock

…with plans to introduce support for more sites in the near future.

After setting up your account lookstat takes 24-27 hours to collect data, imagine if you will there is a lot of data, each image on each site, and each sale of each image on each site… Once that process is completed then you can view this wealth of information in various ways. At first my impression was ‘where are all the buttons and menus?’ You are greeted with a graph of earnings over a selected period, total earnings from each site and some thumbnails of the best sellers - that’s it. From there you can then click the images and links provided to dig down into more specific information, e.g. clicking on each thumbnail image takes to you a list of how that image has sold by month, then clicking on that will take you into the sales of that image by day for the selected month, click that and you can see which agencies sold it on that day. You can of course filter by time periods and a chosen agency.

(Note: the above screen capture contains fictitious data)

Lookstat automates what you perhaps in some respects could do by hand with a spreadsheet or just by rule of thumb observation remembering sales figures over a specific period. For me it confirmed a few interesting things like my DT and SS earnings are approximately the same but lookstat shows me accurately that SS downloads are higher than DT downloads by 1:2.5 for the same income.

The site is still in beta so not everything is complete. The lookstat team are working on adding more sites (which as I understand it are coming sooner rather than later). At a minimum you will find lookstat a very interesting view on your sales, but depending on how many sales/images you have the site can also provide you with some very useful sales trends. The earnings per image over all time across all sites is very interesting especially if in the future that earnings information could be viewed against the time each photo has been on-line in such a way as to show earnings per day for a selected time period. I can already see that my most popular seller over all time no longer sells at all (or has not done in the past several months) probably as it is an old 3.1MP image from around 2004/5, I can see a couple of others that have a similar plot but after more than one year of zero sales an EL for $25 eclipsed all the previous earnings for that file!

Here’s an interesting plot for all those who talk about "feeding the beast", fortunately most of my images have NOT done this!

Security

Security could clearly be a concern for users of lookstat, one which lookstat have addressed by being transparent about all of the security features they have included into the service. If someone gained access to their servers then they could conceivably, although with the encryption used unlikely, have some level of access to your microstock data; this is however no different to your email service, if someone maliciously gained access to your email then they would have just the same (if not more) access to your microstock accounts by resetting passwords and logging in.

This is purely a question of trust, you trust your email host, on-line banks etc and their security systems with your data, there is no reason not to trust lookstat. Their site lists their contact details, staff and a physical address; and I’ve personally met one of their founders, he’s real. Lookstat is certified by McAfee Secure, who independently sweep the site daily for security issues, the same security service is used by some of the major microstock sites.

The Future

Lookstat plan to introduce a charge for their system in the future, setting up such a service is costly and obviously someone has to pay. Their plan is to try to keep the service free for most users only charging those who make a serious income from microstock and hence have the most to gain from the insight lookstat provides.

In addition to the microstock agencies currently supported lookstat plan to support Fotolia, 123rf and Bigstockphoto soon.

You can keep up-to-date with developments at lookstat via the lookstat blog, we’ll also post the major updates here in our news feed (rss).