Microstock News

Startup microstocki vivozoom have announced several changes to their site following buyer feedback , new marketing activity, improved search and "vivotweet" their twitter account. Interestingly they plan to announce their image needs to photographers via email and via twitter; currently citing agriculture, vineyards, farmland, animals, crops, harvest fruits and vegetable as subjects in need.

isyndica announced they now allow users to create new account using their settings from one of several third party sources including flickr, google and facebook. isyndica also now supports the distribution of illustrations (vector images) as well as photos and video. You can now also pay for your upload credits with paypal.

Shutterstock announced (press release) the launch of their shuttertweet application which automatically ‘tweets’ various (banal?) messages about contributors latest approved batches and sales stats.

Dreamstime announced a facebook application and fotolia launched a plugin for the wordpress blogging platform.

Mostphotos announced some server upgrades and that they were still on track with development of their new platform (mostphotos 3.0) details in the mostphotos development blog. A visit to mostphotos will show that the current platform seems excellent at picking attractive looking nature and landscape photos, not necessarily good microstock, this might be one reason my stock photo sales are so low at MP.

Panthermedia announced a new extended license to cater for the needs of corporate buyers, more flexible terms for double the cost of a standard license. New extended subscription options were also announced photographers can choose to opt-out of these extended sales options by 1st September if they want.

In late July Getty officially welcomed the free stock photo site stockxchng (sxc.hu) into the fold by replacing all the stockxpert advertisements on sxc with ads for istockphoto. Getty have controlled sxc since the February takeover of jupiterimages. sxc contributors who have an istockphoto account can include a link to their istock portfolio on scx.hu. Alexa recorded a noticable drop in traffic to stockxpert but only reducing levels to those back in March this year. As most of my sales on stockxpert (SXPi) come from Jupiter unlimited and photos.com so it’s hard for me to be exact about any drop in sales since the change but with alexa reporting 30% of SXPs traffic coming from sxc.hu it can’t be good news for SXP contributors and their sales.

Clustershot added webdav support to allow easier batch uploads.

Dreamstime have announced a change to their photographer comission structure (dreamstime forum post) following a recent announcement of an increase in credit prices. The new structure leaves commissions for exclusive photographers unchanged at 60% but creates a tiered structure reducing royalties for non-exclusive photographers to 30% for the least popular images. Popular images still receive 50% commission rate. Previously dreamstime paid a flat rate of 50% for all sales of non-exclusive photographer images. Exclusive images from non-exclusive photographers have also taken a bonus royalty cut from 10% to 3-5% over standard depending on sales levels.

This makes dreamstime photographer exclusivity far more attractive than it was, it seems that the previous offer just 20 cents per upload over the royalty of an exclusive image from a non-exclusive photographer was not attracting enough exclusive photographers to dreamstime. With the recent increase in cost of credits some non-exclusive photographers may see improvement in their earnings despite the royalty drop. Dreamstime hinted in their statements that their previous higher than industry average royalties was affecting the amount they could spend on marketing their images.

The new structure still offers one of the best commission rates for photographers who produce high selling images, and the baseline rate of 30% is still above that of several of the other top agencies.

The agency also announced 90% increase in traffic according to third party stats monitoring sites, while that sounds like spin and is not necessarily a reflection of actual sales, even if only partly true it still indicates significant growth for dreamstime.

More discussion about exclusive microstock photos and photographers

Comparison of microstock agencies offering exclusivity

Comparison of commission rates

Cutcaster have announced the launch of their "Betta than Vetta" collection, "Betta than Vetta" is apparently Irish for mountaintop, and is a collection of hand selected images available from the cutcaster stock collection of almost 400,000 items.

It’s not the first hand picked collection and certainly not the last. While premium microstock sounds like an oxymoron to some traditionalists, and tongue in cheek or not, I can see that microstock agencies are taking multiple approaches to tackling a common problem: producing good image search results is difficult!

How are the different agencies uncovering their best images?

istockphoto and possibly others track clicks in their search results to match them for relevancy against search terms. Not just frequent downloads with matching keywords are shown in istock results, but images that were popular with people who previously searched for the currently chosen keywords. istock plan to extent this to match against region searched e.g. images often viewed or purchased by Italian buyers will be recorded separately to images popular with buyers based in the states hence creating results more targeted to current trends and national preferences in each region.

Crestock seem to be creating a premium only collection by not selecting anything but the highest quality images. The only sacrifice perhaps being the sanity of contributors (high rejection) and potential perhaps to miss sales of ‘unusual subjects’ that is created by having a collection of such size that virtually anything can be found if you dig deep enough.

Dreamstime have (I think?) begun to crowdsource the selection process with their stock rank game. Stock Rank records images that buyers and photographers think will sell. It compares unsold and sold images side by side possibly allowing dreamstime to filter low quality compositions and poor marketability from their collection even if those images have made an occasional sale. It seems dreamstime have yet to use this data other than to create a vanity badge for their contributors in the forums and profile pages.

Panthermedia hand pick uploads during the review process and mark them as RECOMMENDATION or EDITORIAL TIP giving them priority in search results.

The Untapped Niches

Hand edited collections or at minimum hand picked ‘popular images’ or category pages is a great and relatively easy way to improve the feel of quality in a stock collection, but I feel that there is still money left on the table here. I have always thought that using istock lightboxes and similar tools (here is a typical example of eye candy to inspire all but the most cynical photo editor) or using and APIi like fotolia API to create a niche site or search function is something with a lot more potential for growth.

Creating the facility to allow users to do this I feel should at least be on the to-do list for the agencies that have yet to implement it. If course users won’t spend their own time sifting images unless it’s relatively easy and there is some sort of reward structure in place for doing so, be that via an expensive and potentially risky API or via a relatively simple referral link to their ‘public lightbox’ and a few search tools for searching within that lightbox.

To make and example, it takes a lot more than just sticking ‘food’ into a search to find a great collection of food photos. A good quality hand picked ‘food’ collection would include lifestyle images like picnic’s in open fields, people enjoying a bar-b-que with friends in a back garden, fine restaurant dining, children cooking, enjoying wine on a yacht, the list is endless and very few of these would appear if you just tacked on the keyword ‘food’ and looked at your search results. It’s already been demonstrated making good images easy to find is something that people are willing to pay extra for.

Microstock agencies have built themselves huge collections of images, advanced search tools that further optimise search relevancy for popular terms but compared to macro they are still very much lacking when it comes to serving up ’style’. With so many contributors the good images are all there, but are often lost in the ‘moraine’.

Like leveraging the ‘crowd’ who originally created all these images, I feel there is no better way to generate novel ways to sort and sell all this content than by enabling the crowd to do it. There is no doubt that referral marketing works, but it has it’s pitfalls, it can adversely affect a brand if not controlled properly and catching up with the big agencies in terms of development cost would be an expensive decision for a growing agency. Making use of anything more than the simple API tools is an impossibly steep learning curve for all but the most ‘techie’ of microstock contributors, however these are the exactly people who make a lot of this work - just like a successful microstock agency it’s a mix of photography AND technology knowledge.

Related Posts

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Compare microstock referral programs

isyndica.com have just announced a restructuring of their pricing. I reviewed isyndica a couple of months back and since then I’ve been using it as part of my normal upload workflow. One of the only gripes I had at the time was the price, but now things have changed.

Update: iSyndica have announced a contest offering the chance to win $200 Apple gift cards

Pricing starting at free!

There is still a free isyndica account which offers 100 free credits per month (an image upload to a chosen agency is one credit, ten credits for a video). You can now buy prepaid credits that never expire for 1 cent each, the minimum purchase being 500 credits for $5.

Prices for paid subscriptions have reduced, now starting at 4.99 per month which gets you 200 credits, again you can buy additional upload credits for 1c each.

Backup storage included

Paid accounts now include the bonus of secure backup storage of your images along with stats/analytics of your sales and custom FTPi upload channels (syndicate to any agency that supports ftp).

If you only want to upload your images to any of the 21 supported image agencies (as of 30 July 09) or 7 supported video agencies then a free account is all you need, paying for additional (more than 100) uploads as you need them.

I always like to highlight both benefits and any negatives of services I review, with iSyndica I have a problem, the iSyndica team keep adding new features to the site. The lack of support for secure ftp / veer marketplace was a minor issue as was my complaint about credits expiring, both have now been fixed. So far I have found the service reliable and a big time saver, I really can’t think of anything bad to write.

indepth isyndica review

isyndica.com

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