Microstock News

Quite a month compared to January:

As previously posted, Getty launched their new subscription site thinkstock and closed stockxpert.

Shutterstock reached 10 million images, at this rate that’s going to double to 20 million images in less than 2 years.

Also this Month:

Fotolia officially announced the launch of the Microstock Photo Plugin for WordPress. Bloggers can download the plugin to simplify the process of buying and inserting fotolia images into their blog posts. New fotolia users can receive 5 free credits when they register, bloggers can also optionally earn affiliate revenue when a visitor buys an image from fotolia after clicking on it in their blog.

Isyndica announced a range of updates including a spell checker, support for moneybookers, alamy and discounted yearly subscriptions. The updates also included a "leaderboard" which compares your best selling agencies to those across the rest of the isyndica users. Right now my istock sales look a little atypical!

lookstat published a useful microstock guide, written as an introduction to microstock for RF (macro) and RM photographers. It includes some statistics, advice and checklists that are still useful for microstock photographers who already know the ropes.

shutterstock launched a "facebook connect’ app to provide a service similar to their shuttertweet feature. As a bonus you also earn an affiliate royalty on sales made of your images if people buy them after seeing them in your feed. If you want to announce your sales and uploads to your facebook friends there are instructions on your shutterstock account page.

fotolia also launched flixtime.com a service similar to animoto.com that allows you to upload your own photos and videos to create a dynamic video presentation, users of flixtime can also choose free stock images from a media lounge and also sign-up to fotolia to obtain three free photos from the fotolia collection and discounts on future purchases.

Deposit photos started a free trial subscription where (potential) buyers can download up to 140 images free of charge. Photographers are paid for each download as though the images were being charged for. I also had my first sale at deposit photos - still early days there…

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A couple of days ago the counter at the top of the shutterstock website ticked over to 10,000,000 images - well actually that could be better described as "shot past 10 million at an astonishing rate". There are currently about 100k new images accepted each week. Only about 40% of uploads are high enough quality to pass shutterstock review process.

The milestone image was uploaded by Canadian photographer Matthew Jacques and can be seen here.

Matthew has been a Shutterstock submitter since 2006. He started taking pictures as a hobby, and recently used his Shutterstock earnings to invest in a professional-quality DSLR camera and has branched out to shoot motor sports, weddings and portraits. “My hobby’s paying for itself” he says.

125 Million Downloads

The really interesting thing in the press release was that for the first time shutterstock have announced the number of images that have been downloaded in total:  more than 125 Million downloads since 2003. Making an ‘average of 12.5 downloads per image’ - on it’s own that’s a misleading calculation considering the range of abilities of photographers working in microstock and the varying ages of images on the site. None the less, sharing this and their average acceptance rate is very useful, it makes shutterstock a yardstick to measure other agencies against. Unfortunately not all agencies are quite so open minded when it comes to sharing such info.

Read more about shutterstock in our review

Visit the shutterstock photographer pages

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After yesterday unveiling thinkstockphotos (announced late last year as the ‘new Getty subscription site’) Getty have announced that Stockxpert will close with almost immediate effect.

Stockxpert Buyers

Credits are no longer being sold on stockxpert, nor can new buyers register. Those with existing credits on SXP can transfer them on a 1:1 basis for credits on istockphoto.

1/5 of Images Transferred

Contributors that had opted into reselling images by subscription at SXP have had many of their images transferred to thinkstock. 365 of the 409 Images I had on SXP have been transferred, perhaps I should rephrase that as "are now available via" thinkstock. For the immediate future contributors still log into SXP to access their earnings, stats and control their images. It looks like not all my 409 images are available purely because I have some identical photos on istockphoto also available via thinkstock and these duplicates have been filtered out.

On thinkstock content sourced from stockxpert is now part of the "Hemera" collection, and while I’m not sure that this is exclusively the images from SXP a comparison on search results from this collection and identical terms on SXP gave me the figure of just over 20% as stated above. Possible this figure will climb as those who have not opted into the subscription sales on SXP change their mind; but noted that there was some strong resistance to the price point that Getty was offering contributors of just US $0.25 per download.

It was coming for a long time

There had been lots of rumours and comments following the acquisition of Jupiterimages by Getty that Stockxpert was doomed. Then following the August news that all advertising on stockxperts parent site stockxchng was to be redirected to istockphoto the outlook did not look good. The ending of photos.com sales (again replaced by istock) and a few other issues like broken links on the site meant that the signs were all there. My inbox at stockxpert marks out the time-line.

All that said, I for one was not expecting this news, but we could all tell something big was happening. With rumours that stockxpert were implementing Gettys controlled vocabulary I was, perhaps naively, in the camp that thought a big transformation about to happen. Indeed it has, but closure was not the transformation I was quite expecting. The future of the collection currently housed at SXP is a little hazy to me. With no way to upload new images it looks like we are just ‘cashing in’ on this collection before it ages.

What’s wrong with just having photos.com?

well I guess it’s branding, that’s just another sign microstock is now completely mainstream:

photos.com (plus) is a website that offers subscription stock images at $249.95 a month
vs.
thinkstock is a brand that offers subscription stock images at $249.00 a month

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Veer have announced some exciting plans to integrate their marketplace microstock collection with the 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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