Microstock News

Veer have announced some exciting plans to integrate their marketplace microstock collection with their rest of their website making the marketplace "front and center" in their search results. Veer marketplace currently resides in a separate tab on veer.com, and results are displayed in a separate sidebar along with the main search.

The changes (planned for Q2) will include a new interface and also see the removal of veers Rights Managed collection to a new site (yet to be announced) which will target "more traditional and sophisticated customers".

Veer also promise to "substantially increase our marketing activities to spread the word about our simple web site and affordable offering to a much bigger audience" once the changes have been implemented.

more on this story on the BJP website "Corbis is betting on microstock and royalty-free images as it plans to adapt it’s Veer offering by dropping rights-managed".

 

Other January News

Well, not much! the amicable closure of zymmetrical just missed out on Decembers news post.

Bigstockphoto have added a feature which helps warn contributors automatically that their keywords match those of protected designs and intellectual property, there is a useful list of these keywords here

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NEW YORK, NY, January 12, 2010 – Sales of $1 images continued to generate six-figure incomes for the world’s top photographers in 2009. The three best selling images on Fotolia.com accounted for nearly 10,000 downloads this past year. Images from the top three sellers range from $1 - $20 per download, depending on the size required.

“The best photographers and artists in the world upload their images to Fotolia because they know we aggressively market to buyers in 12 countries around the world,” says CEO Oleg Tscheltzoff. “Fotolia’s growth has been phenomenal, thanks to the quality and affordability of our stock imagery.”

In alphabetical order, the top three sellers in 2009 on www.fotolia.com were:

Artist: ioannis kounadeas
http://www.fotolia.com/id/10056459

Artist: Monkey Business
http://www.fotolia.com/id/8653783

Artist: pressmaster
http://www.fotolia.com/id/6202659

-30-

Over 1.5 million people prefer Fotolia, LLC for affordable, royalty-free images, graphics and HD videos. With the introduction of the Infinite Collection, Fotolia became the first worldwide microstock organization to offer both crowd-sourced and professional images on one site. Founded in New York City in 2004, Fotolia spans the globe with websites in 10 languages and offices in 12 countries. With over 8,000,000 images to choose from, find it on Fotolia. www.fotolia.com

Media Contact:
Jennifer Laraway
Director of Communications, North America
Fotolia, LLC
Direct: 1.403.708.9398
jennifer@fotolia.com
www.fotolia.com
Twitter: fotoliaUSA

Technorati Tags :
Fotolia |
images |
best seller |
photographers |
2009 |
Oleg Tscheltzoff |

Less than a week in yet that hang-over seems so long ago! I submitted 170 images last year, that’s nothing like the number I was planning 12 months ago, that’s despite upload being easier than ever. Thinking back 12 months and things felt very different, as I’m sure they will in 12 months time. Good news being that my earnings are up.

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Looking Back - A 2009 Retrospective

February saw a trip to San Jose for UGCX where I had the opportunity to meet with fellow photographers, bloggers and big wigs from the stock photo world - in fact much ‘bigger wings’ that I imagined meeting. The whole thing gave me a much broader perspective on the industry, if you think microstock seems to be constantly changing and morphing you "ain’t seen nothin". That said I can’t quite get away from thinking about the "Random organizational changes" Scott Adams wrote about in as "management time fillers" in the Dilbert principle book. But what do I know!?

Veer arrived and caused a stir, with their, at the time "incredible shock! horror!" news that they would be mixing full price and micro on one website. 10 months later It just seems like a natural thing to provide clients with a range of images from various sources, some budget and some premium.

Shutterstock bought out bigstockphoto allowing them to take a part of the pay-as-you-go market while also concentrating on their core subscription business.

Probably the biggest change of the year from the contributors point of view was the launch of isyndica - that day uploading got a lot easier. In making the whole process easier for everyone we all face an even more difficult job getting our images accepted. While your workflow is still critical for success the focus of microstock is moving even more towards great photos (which it should) and not being an issue of overcoming technical problems like post processing and uploading. Lookstat also launched their paid services for processing keywording and submitting images, aimed at stock imaging professionals it caters for photographers who "only take photos" leaving them to do what they do best, in some respects combining lookstat and the agencies mirrors the process of traditional stock.

12 months ago the big agencies had about 5 million images each - right now they are hurtling towards 8 million, and shutterstock leading with 9,480,272 as I write this. 10 million is coming very soon with well over 1/4 million new images a month.

 

An old friend brings comfort in times of change

Towards the end of the last year we revisited the "microstock in evil" thread in the blogosphere (how ‘last decade’ does blogosphere sound!), this time extended into to the whole of stock photography being evil, some quite amusing posts were tabled:

stock photography is a gold rush, ("The only people who profit are those selling the tools", kind of ironic considering the website that’s published on) If microstock is a gold rush then it’s been rushing quite nicely for at least 5 years.

we’re a bunch of monkeys in a post riddled with factual error and assumptions based on thin evidence. Tyler at MSG made rather a nice rebuttal to that "story".

…oh and that bloody jar of coins, again the irony is not lost on me when considering the subject of the Time magazine cover story and the expectation that someone deserves 3k for such a photo.

and after the smoke has cleared your welcome to slit your wrists and end it all because we’re all just wasting our time. (Sadly there is an air of truth to thoughts of a bohemian, in that while microstock quality goes up and up, the photos in print media which were always exceptional/thought provoking/cleverly chosen are now starting to look like something just pasted in to fill the space.)

and finally my favourite: a parallel between microstock and China’s environmental policy.

I’m not blinkered to these stories, I do think some big change is happend and more on it’s way for microstock and stock photography in general, these days change is ALWAYS on it’s way. Microstock is still seen by some as the cuckoo in the nest throwing out the traditional business, but melodramatic as it might sound I think it’s more the meteorite and dinosaurs.

I think these stories and arguments will go on forever: we work in an industry that at one end has amateurs who consider the cost of shooting an image to be zero, and at the other end professionals who are acutely aware "that time is money". Just because digital photos don’t have physical processing costs does not mean that they are free! Microstock needs both, without the amateurs it will grow up into a tunnel-minded industry obsessed with churning out clone images just like the ones that already sell. No offence intended to those out there who create new and creative material each time they shoot.

 

Word(s) of the Year

The "GFC". I wrote a post back in March that the microstock industry did not seem to be affected by the global financial crisis. Last month Fotolia were telling us how much they grew during the crisis. I also read Getty contributors talking about sales ‘falling of the edge of a cliff’, microstock did not follow suit, but I’m not gloating about that. Any ‘death’ in the macrostock world, perhaps we should say ‘re-alignment’, not only reduces of the ability for microstockers to ‘move up’ into premium images but also makes for a whole lot more overcrowding in microstock as macro photographers dump portfolios. Fotolia invited macro photographers to do just that with some enticements in their operation level ground, most things that FT do, if not popular, are quite shrewd - lessons in how to weather a storm. 

 

Looking Forward, Plans and the Future

Looking forward to 2010 leads me to wonder can amateurs still sell their work at microstock? Of course I already know the answer to that: yes, absolutely, it’s the amateurs that defined microstock, they are a vital part. Look at Getty trawling flickr to get ‘natural style stock’… Sometimes looking at acceptance rates and comments from noobs I’m not quite so sure it’s that easy.

I think making assumptions based on ‘handed down’ knowledge were the biggest things that I have learnt in 2009, in that they are not always correct. Lots of nice copyspace and the experience of thumbnail readability are one where I think microstock breaks a lot of expectations - we all ‘know’ that designers love copyspace, but they don’t seem to buy it. I repeatedly hear that designers also hate contrasty images and over saturated colours, yet many of the microstock sellers seem to be just that (fine for web but not that good for print perhaps). There are no hard and fast rules here but I just get the feeling that a lot of things that I have learnt from other people and seen first-hand in the past 10 years are not quite as set in stone as I thought they were.

‘Free’ and Creative Commons, more important than ever.

I could sit here and make all sorts of new year resolutions about uploading more this year; one thing that is for sure is that I should probably be getting that next batch ready instead of typing this.

So stop reading and go start taking photos and selling them; finally, if a little belated, all the best for 2010 from microstockinsider.

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Slightly longer than usual since my last news digest - it’s slow on news over the holidays…

Fotolia launched a ‘tax centre’ in their account control panel, all contributors are required to complete tax forms before payments are made. This practice is in line with shutterstock and veer. For individuals in many countries it’s a reasonably simple process of reading some documentation and filling out a form online. Contributors have until January 1 2010 to complete their forms.

Veer introduced 10,000 USD customer protection to images purchased in their marketplace.

Panthermedia reduced their prices more inline with the rest of the microstock industry. It appears that midstock prices did not work for them(?), the licensing options have also been streamlined which is a good good thing, as they’re still not exactly straight forward (that is not uncommon on sites with subscriptions, credit options and multiple licenses to understand).

imagecatalog quietly passed away in late November, unloved and unnoticed by most.

istock announced (in a well worded release) their 2010 pricing, some significant changes to prices for exclusive photographers images and their vetta collection, plus a changes to their canister levels for contributors. The only thing I object is Kelly’s comment that "Exclusive collection is built on rich, unique imagery unlike anything else out there". Istock certainly have something good in their exclusive contributor base and exclusive collection, and yes those images are unique (you can’t buy them elsewhere), but a quick look through recent istock exclusive uploads reveals some very ordinary images from their exclusives (and some good ones), a good proportion of those exclusive images are very much "like anything else out there". The doubling of prices of exclusive images is probably a good idea, so long as new the search is implemented well. When vetta launched all vetta images appeared first in the search results completely eclipsing the lower priced images, the "problem" with best match was soon corrected to show a better mix of images. Istock have every right to bias search results towards exclusive images so long as the lower quality exclusive images (there are plenty of them!) don’t come ahead of higher quality images or better matches from a non-exclusive contributors, If they do impatient buyers may go elsewhere.

Dreamstime also announced their ‘pay rise’ by announcing their 2010 payment schedule, c/w a comparison of last years prices (thank you DT). More credits per download for most image sizes and easier to attain level 5 images (50 DL instead of 100 DL).

Fotoila snuck in a change to their 24 months unsold images for 50 cents program, these images are now locked into their free API for 5 years instead of the previous 18 months. Tact? More Gordon Brown than Barack Obama I think… comments on MSG. FT also more publicly announced in a newsletter that new buyers, contributor earnings, credit purchases and photographer payouts were all up by around 50% on 2008 levels, API calls were up 203% (API calls are 3rd party websites and software reselling or searching for licensable images).

Fotolia also cut commission to their contributors by up to 5% (read on it’s not all bad news). Exclusive photographers also took athe same cut and still receive17% more than non-exclusives (in addition to higher sale price per image). Royalties now increase by 3% per fotolia rank i.e. non exclusives now receive 28% after 100 downloads 31% after 1000 instead of the previous 34%, 34% and upwards. This will benefit their well established photographers and penalise the majority of hobbyists. It’s not all bad news as prices have increased (basic images are now $1,3,5 (Xsmall, Small, Medium) instead of the previous $1,2,4 dollars, so all but the smallest images you should see more income.

Clustershot announced that they have partnered with tineye to have all their images indexed. This brings the potential for people seeing your images elsewhere online to search for a place to license them.

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