As top microstock figures complain about growing competition, rising saturation and declining returns per image, microstock companies are starting to push back. Warnings from figures as big as Yuri Arcurs, even as he rolls out a three-year study program, are leading sites to think about how they can best serve both their contributors, whom they need to continue supplying content, and their buyers who always want to pay less for that content and already have plenty of other places and pictures to choose from. Dreamstime, one of the biggest microstock firms, is both typical of the problem and an example of the measures that sites are taking to overcome it.

Dreamstime now has over 13 million images in its inventory and accepts around 300,000 new submissions each month from about 130,000 contributors. The company’s policy over the last few years has been to cover not just a wide range of categories but the entire range of prices. The site claims to have the largest collection of free royalty-free images (a growing inventory of 350,000 photos) but also offers a unique “SR-EL” license that grants full rights and exclusivity for $5,000. According to Serban Enache, the site’s CEO, though, the average price for an image still stands at “a few dollars.” That’s hardly the sort of rate that’s going to make it easy for photographers to justify the expenses involved in creating it, especially when the number of other photos available mean that each image will now sell fewer copies than it might have done in the past.

No More Photos from You

Dreamstime’s strategy is to improve the quality of the images it offers at the expense of the quantity. Since 2010, the site has been imposing strict submission limits which rise as a contributor’s approval rating improves. Photographers start with the ability to submit 20 images per week and have the potential to upload as many 210 photos per week.

“New contributors are more talented and/or more pros are joining the website. These facts along with technological improvements and the size of our database force us to constantly raise the quality bar,” Serban Enache told us. “We still accept the landscapes, nature shots, skylines, models on white, etc., but they need to be exquisite in order to be accepted and to sell.”

Rare images, such as pictures of remote places, can sell well and without competition, Enache continued, and shots of events taken at the right moment can be valuable additions to the editorial category.

“As competition grows, contributors need to constantly increase quality, provide diversity and fill as many niches as possible,” he advised. “Part of their duties is to research, not only to shoot. Learn to create, not to photograph.”

But Dreamstime isn’t just being more selective about the images it accepts now that it has enough images to cover all its categories; it’s also being more careful about the photographs it offers. That giant collection of free images is more than an attempt to attract designers looking for a bargain before hitting them up with better images for a fee. It’s also a place to store excess images that are puffing up the inventory. Images that haven’t sold in three years are either deleted or moved to the free section. Those free images are also curated, with some permanently deleted. Dated photographs, with wardrobes or props shot five years ago and which are no longer selling, are among those being pared away.

Microstock’s New Demands

• Landscape shots of hard-to-reach locations.
• Niche images (if you can find an unsaturated niche).
• Editorial events and shots of conflict.
• Technical perfection.

Dreamstime then is trying to its part to keep microstock viable by being more careful about what it offers to buyers. But Serban Enache also stresses that photographers have a role to play. Asked whether it’s still possible for photographers to make a living with microstock, he replied by asserting that full-time microstock photography is possible but only “if you are careful about your expenses and you work hard.”

He also noted though that not everyone who contributes to microstock is looking to make a profit. Amateurs just want to earn enough to upgrade their equipment while improving their skills. Hobbyists are just happy to see their image being used.

“This is in many cases more important than the revenue. Knowing your work is endorsed by people throughout the world gives you a great feeling and self-confidence,” he said.

Watch the Expenses

When stock first appeared, Enache argued, it was only meant as an additional revenue stream for photographers. Only later did it become a main source of income, and he warns photographers not to neglect other revenue opportunities.

If that sounds like a big qualification of his assertion that photographers can make a living out of microstock, it’s also sound advice. Enache warns that even when stock revenues do come in, they can do so slowly and over a long period (before the props and clothes make them unfashionable). And he points out that no photographer can expect to have a good ROI if he spends too much money creating the pictures.

None of this is particularly good news for photographers. Amateurs and hobbyists might get to enjoy the occasional fillip when one of the 20 images they’re allowed to upload each week is bought, but they’re still less likely to consider the expenses, forcing photographers who are looking to make money to reduce theirs. That makes it even harder to produce the higher quality images that microstock sites are now looking for.

Dreamstime’s emphasis on quality rather than quantity raises the entry bar and gives preferential treatment to better photographers. But those photographers include those who aren’t concerned about income and while greater selectivity and a more brutal approach to curation might slow the rate of saturation and improve the picture slightly for declining ROIs, there are no signs that sites are going to cut their inventories back to the kind of peak income levels last seen in 2009. For that to happen growth has to come from buyers. Serban Enache indicated that his firm had grown 50 percent year on year. If microstock sites and photographers are struggling then a cavalry of buyers might just save the day.

Photography: artbyheather

With photographers already battling against lower fees and increased competition, the last thing they need is another platform offering photography services at cutthroat prices. And yet, Fiverr, a service on which users pitch a range of different jobs for a flat five dollar fee, does now include a number of photographers selling their skills for little more than the price of a latte and a pastry at Starbucks.

The jobs aren’t pushed hard. Fiverr’s categories include gifts and graphics, programming, music and audio, as well as business and technology. Photography isn’t listed. But search for “photography” on the site and you’ll find around 537 people willing to do something image-related for just five bucks.

That might sound horrific, but the good news is that very few of those jobs involve image-creation. Of the first 30 gigs returned no more than six actually involved working with photos themselves. Most of those were quick Photoshop edits. One was an offer of an image and motivational quote, apparently for personal use, another was a shot of light-writing, which could be done quite quickly, and a third was a pitch from a seller in India of “5+1” images which, judging by the quality of the samples, were probably overpriced. The remainder of the photography gigs pitched on the site seemed to be made up largely of offers of advice, ebooks and even backlinks on photographers’ websites.

Jen Priester, for example, is selling the answer to any question “related to editing or photography.” If she can’t answer it, the buyer can ask another one. But she should be able to answer it because Priester is a professional photographer. She’s been shooting full-time for a year and specializes in families, babies and particularly newborns.

Priester learned about Fiverr from a friend when she was looking for some low-cost help with search engine optimization.

“It is a great, fast and easy way to make some extra money,” she told us. “It doesn’t take too long, and as for buying for yourself, it’s only $5!”

She considers the small sum she demands for answering a question “a very fair price,” even though she charges as much as $1,000 a day for photographers to watch her at work in her studio. Despite that “fair price” though, the job has been up for a couple of weeks and has yet to pick up a response.

That might be because Priester is pitching the wrong kind of service. Ben Evans is a British photographer, now based in Spain, who provides a range of different services on the site. He has been using Fiverr for two years, initially out of curiosity after buying low-cost SEO and web design services on the site. Like Jen Priester, he is also offering to answer any photography-related question for five dollars. That job has been up for two months and like, Jen Priester’s job offer, has had little by way of response.

Evans has, however, managed to sell some other photography-related jobs. An offer to process and optimize three images for Web viewing has picked up at least one sale. A photograph to “illustrate any concept you want” was sold at least twice over the last six months.

It’s hard to see how the image processing could possible pay for itself. Even if the total time spent on the optimization amounted to no more than a couple of minutes for each image, add in the time spent placing the ad and emailing the client and Evans would be hard-pressed to hit the stopwatch at fifteen minutes — an hourly rate of just $20. And Evans is a professional photographer who has been shooting events since he was at university and now combines commercial work with people photography.

That makes his offer of “any concept you want” even harder to understand — until you realize that he’s looking to get more out of advertising on the site than a crisp five dollar bill.

“I’m actually writing a book about photography at the moment, so this is more market-research than it is a money-making venture,” he explains. “I teach photography professionally with www.BarcelonaPhotographyCourses.com so I do get a lot of opportunity to see what aspects of photography people struggle with, but Fiverr just extends this internationally. The picture on any topic is again a personal challenge to hone my skills.”

That might be a little smarter. Enthusiasts have been known to pay to receive photography challenges; Ben Evans has managed to find a place where others will pay him to set one.

That would still be a bad deal though if the person paying was an advertising agency looking for an image to use in a national campaign. But those aren’t the kinds of people looking to buy photographer services on Fiverr. In fact, even when you can sell an image on the site, it’s unlikely that you’ll then be able to upsell more expensive services to the same client.

“I’ve learned, mainly through an experience with Groupon, that you cannot move from cheap to premium,” says Evans. “If people are shopping on Fiverr, generally they’re not prepared to pay for my photography services outside of Fiverr…. Clients on the site are happy with what they get, but are usually buying on an ad-hoc basis.”

Even as a rival to microstock where sales of images cost less than five dollars, Fiverr is too limited, says Evans, because scaling up is too difficult. Most of the jobs he’s sold on the site have actually been English accented voiceovers of up to five minutes each. At just under a dollar minute, with time taken off for client contact, that comes closer to a reasonable amount of money. He’s sold more than 30 of them.

While Craigslist has become renowned as a place to pitch for budget event photography, it’s some relief to see that there is a limit to how far the market will drop. Photographers might be willing to hawk their knowledge on the site but few buyers see the value in trying to commission a photography for a fee that would barely pay for the coffee they’d drink on the shoot.

Yuri Arcurs, probably the world’s most successful microstock photographer, is preparing to launch a training program in stock photography. Arcurs is looking for between ten and fifteen “interns” who want to learn how to shoot professional stock images. The interns, or “students,” will receive free accommodation, food, and access to equipment, including Canons, Nikons, Hasselblad SLR cameras and RED epic video cameras. Students will spend six months at Arcur’s studios in Cape Town, three months in Denmark and three months shooting in other parts of the world with all travel expenses covered by Yuri Arcurs Productions. The course will last three years, focus on stock photography but cover other photography areas too.

According to Kelly Pollock, a junior recruiter for the program, Yuri Arcurs Productions is working on an agreement to film the course for a reality television series but any agreement would only be a bonus to the program. The real incentive is to help talented photographers acquire the knowledge they need to break into stock photography.

“Yuri wants to sow back into the industry,” said Ms Pollock. “He recognises that there are many talented people who are passionate about photography and could be fantastic photographers if just given a chance. He has the capital to fund this and give those people the opportunity to break into the industry.”

Photography Students Will Receive Pocket Money

No photography experience is required but applicants, who will be tested at a bootcamp in Cape Town in January, will need their own digital SLR camera capable of shooting at least 10 mega pixels, a 50mm/85mm lens  with an aperture of no less than 2.0, a 16 GB memory card and
a clean criminal record.

Students will have no expenses during the course but they also won’t have much in the way of income. They will receive “pocket money” which will be drawn from the funds earned by the images they shoot. Any additional revenues will be used to help fund the course’s expenses. While that might suggest that the interns are effectively paying for their education by handing over the images they create for the next 36 months, it’s unlikely that a new microstock photographer with little or no experience would earn enough to cover all the costs of the training and equipment they’ll use during the course.

Three years is still a long time to be without a source of income though. It’s little different to the time spent on a degree course but college does at least provide a qualification and a broad look at professional photography.

More tellingly, one of the draws of microstock is that anyone can submit their images and begin to make sales. Does Yuri Arcurs really believe it takes three years of training to become a successful microstock photographer?

“At least!” said Ms Pollock. “It is an illusion of some that stock photography is an easier form of photography than many other sectors. The final products may look simple and easy, but much work and sweat goes into getting the perfect photographs…. In fact, with all the training and input, the photographers should just be good enough for Yuri Arcurs Productions standards at the end of the three year period!”

A more important consideration though — and one much harder to answer — is whether the knowledge they’ll pick up during the course will still have value in three years’ time. Arcurs himself has talked of his return per image peaking at $9.10 in 2009 and falling to an expected $5.60 in 2011, a decline created in part by the increasing numbers of enthusiasts taking market share from full time professionals.

The Future of Microstock is Professional

The launch of the course does seem to imply that for Arcurs, the solution to the pressures on microstock don’t lie in more enthusiasts competing on microstock sites but in properly trained and dedicated photographers producing better and more commercial images.

“Stock photography has become a very competitive industry and yes, without excellent training, a dedicated mentor and the correct environment, new photographers will most probably not be able to make it,” said Ms Pollock. “The industry today is very different from when Yuri first entered it, and someone hoping to enter into it needs to have all the elements in place to stand a chance. Even Yuri himself would not have been able to do today what he did only several years back.”

It’s easy to be cynical about Yuri Arcurs’s training program. But it’s not certain that he is wrong about the importance of professional training before starting a microstock career. Currently, half of iStock’s sales come from just 1.6 percent of its contributors, including Yuri Arcurs. Those figures may be declining as more enthusiasts make occasional sales, but the best way to compete is to shoot better and market more, not shoot less and shoot worse.

Three years is a long commitment especially to a young, volatile part of an industry that has an uncertain future. But there’s no doubt that Yuri Arcurs himself has been phenomenally successful in a field in which most photographers can claim at best a moderate income. Even if microstock turns out to have little room in three years’ time for professionals who need to count their expenses, the kind of professionalism and business acumen that his company has shown will always have value. And while stock photography in general is under pressure, the photographers who are most likely to make a living in the industry are those who are both the most talented and the most knowledgeable.

Photography enthusiasts who wish to apply need to send an application to jobs@arcurs.com before December 1, 2011. The email should be marked “photography student” and include: a motivational letter explaining why you are interested in taking the course; a resumé, reference letter from previous employers; a bio; a photograph of yourself; and a statement showing a clean criminal record.

When Yuri Arcurs, probably the world’s most successful microstock photographer, told macrostock photographer John Lund at the beginning of the year that his return per image had fallen from a peak of $9.10 in 2009 to $7.10 in 2010, and that he expected it to reach $5.60 in 2011, it seemed like a seminal moment for microstock photographers. It was a situation, Arcurs pointed out, that wasn’t sustainable and he hinted that without some movement from the agencies he might one day choose to sell directly from his own site, skipping the middle men and their predetermined prices altogether. If even Yuri Arcurs is worrying about the sustainability of microstock photography, has the industry had its day?

In fact, the situation may be more complex than that: more hopeful for part-time photographers and less rosy for professionals. The problem is the size and growth of the supply. As more photographers have signed up and submitted their images, they’ve forced a larger number of photographs to compete for the same search terms. Sales overall may be growing but they’re being spread among more images, and it’s not just Yuri Arcurs’s pictures that are feeling the pinch.

 “There is a pretty consistent drop in RPI for everyone,” says Bob Davies of PicNiche and a close follower of microstock statistics. “The saturated market is causing downward price-pressures (not accounting for premium collections).”

Davies’s own tool, which tracks the gap between the demand for particular terms and the supply of images that suit them, may help photographers to spot opportunities but even those doors are closing. Eventually all current in-demand terms will become saturated, he warns, although some will fill faster than others, depending mostly on the ease with which a photographer can shoot them.

“It’s a natural progression for any ‘crowd-sourced’ market,” says Davies. “The same thing is always found in mature markets, online and offline when scaled.”

Davies recommends a number of solutions both for agencies and for photographers. The microstock sites, he argues, have to be more selective and reject images for which they already have sufficient supply. Photographers, too, need to be more pro-active in their marketing. If the initial focus for microstock photographers was on producing larger numbers of images, then on producing better images, the focus now should be on selling those images to buyers.

Dreamstime Rejects Similar Images

Some sites are already taking action. Search algorithms are tweaked so that images that don’t sell immediately are pushed down the results, ensuring that only a fraction of the available photos are actually seen by buyers. Sites, too, are rejecting photos that are similar to those already on offer.

According to Serban Enache, CEO of Dreamstime, similarity is the most common reason for rejection on his site, especially for new contributors who submit without checking the existing database. Refusing pictures that are too similar in angle variation or format helps to protect sales and royalties, he told us.

But despite offering more than 12 million images, receiving around 350,000 monthly submissions and accepting more than 2,000 new contributors each month, Enache denies that microstock is already full. Even though similar images are rejected, older pictures, he argues, fall away to be replaced by newer and better versions.

“There is no saturation if you look at the fact that some of the content submitted five years ago is already exceeded by images submitted today,” he says. “While the biggest quality of stock is to be generic, content gets refreshed and replaced, with newer images having better aesthetic and technical values.”

If Arcurs and other established photographers are seeing their returns shrink then, it’s not just the number of images that are pushing down prices but the numbers of new photographers submitting better images.

Just 1.6 Percent of Photographers Produce 50 Percent of iStock’s Sales

What may be happening then is a broadening of what Bob Davies has called the long tail of microstock photography. In a recent presentation at the StockinRussia conference, Davies noted that 80 percent of iStock’s images come from just 6,609 photographers, 18 percent of its total contributors. Half of iStock’s total supply came from its most prolific 5 percent. For sales, the figures are even more skewed. Eighty percent of sales came from 2,756 photographers, 7 percent of the site’s total. Just 1.6 percent of iStock’s photographers, 606 contributors, were responsible for half of all the site’s sales. Agencies, says Davies, favor those photographers in their search results, protecting their position in the market, improving the chances that buyers will find a professional quality image quickly — and making life a little harder for newer photographers to gain a foothold.

But not hard enough if Arcurs’s falling RPI is anything to go by. Those initial high returns may have reflected a time when photographers had relatively few competitors but now that the industry has matured — and more photographers have joined an open industry — the true size of the opportunity for people who want to make money from their images may be becoming apparent. And it may not be large enough for professionals. Arcurs has said that he struggles to produce a picture for less than $20, a consideration that not every contributor bears in mind when he takes out his camera or produces an image for sale. If he’s enjoying the photography that he creates in his spare time and sells for pennies, then the cost of creating the image isn’t a business expense.

Just as professional macrostock photographers bemoaned the rise of low-cost microstock photographers so professional microstock photographers may now be looking with similar concern at the growth of part-timers able to eat up their revenues by producing apparently expense-free images.

The question though is what will happen to images that aren’t expense-free and aren’t fun for part-timers to shoot. Shots with lots of models, for example, cost lots of money to produce. As they become rarer, their prices should rise. It’s possible then that we’ll see even more fragmentation in the stock industry as microstock supplies low-cost generic images and top microstock photographers focus on higher-priced, harder and more professional imagery. The rise of “premium” microstock may continue, leaving part-timers and enthusiasts with the small earnings of “traditional” microstock photography but still providing a niche for more dedicated photographers willing to invest in their work.

Linda Johannessen, CEO of microstock site YAY Micro, believes that microstock photographers are getting a rough deal — and should do something about it. As long as photographers are willing to accept low commissions, she argues, the large players in the microstock market will be free to increase their earnings at the expense of their contributors. The solution, she told us, is for photographers around the world to club together and fight for a fairer share of the profits.

“The marketing channel in microstock leaves the photographers powerless, except for the largest contributors. It’s an unfortunate situation, and I think the only way to combat this is for microstock photographers to join together in a global union.”

It’s a call that might sound self-defeating coming from the chief executive and part-owner of a microstock site, but YAY Micro has gone some way towards creating a fairer system for both sellers and buyers.

The site was formed in 2008 by three former employees of Scandinavian image agency Scanpix. The company had tasked Johannessen, together with colleagues Jan Ole Kjellesvig and Roger Bystrøm, to investigate the potential for expanding into microstock. Scanpix, which specializes in editorial imagery, eventually decided not to open its own microstock site, but the team members were so convinced of the sector’s potential that they decided to leave their jobs and create their own service — even before they had any funding in place.

Since then, Oddbjørn Sjøgren has replaced Bystrøm as CTO and partner, and the site has built a collection of 1.6 million images contributed by some 4,795 photographers. Yuri Arcurs is there as are professional contributors MonkeyBusiness and ImageSource.

A Flat 50 Percent Royalty to Everyone

Asked what makes YAY Micro unique in a market filled with dozens of similar services, and Johannessen compares her site’s contribution to Apple’s move into music players.

“I like to point out that most companies don’t have anything unique. What matters is to do everything better than your competitors, and to create a greater value for your users,” she says. “Apple makes PCs and mp3-players but the brand, the product experience and the design makes them stand out.”

That all sounds a little vague and YAY Micro is still far from sharing Apple’s brand awareness but a couple of standout features do suggest that the site is bringing something new to microstock: a sense of fair play. For sellers that means an equal share of the sales price. Instead of sliding scales dependent on sales volume that, on iStockPhoto, top out at 20 percent for non-exclusive images and 45 percent for exclusive contributors, Yay Micro pays out a flat 50 percent to everyone.

That may change if YAY Micro introduces exclusivity incentives (in which case the company may alter the commission, take a price premium on exclusive images or do both) but for now all sales are split evenly with contributors regardless of how many images they’ve sold or the number of sites they contribute to.

“At YAY we feel it’s only fair to share 50/50 with our photographers,” explains Johannessen. “We aim to treat our photographers fairly, with openness and respect, and we would welcome any stakeholder groups representing photographers. In the long run, photographers will be best off by supporting the agencies with fair commissions.”

Nor is it just the sellers who are getting a fair deal. Although bulk discounts are available (the most popular package appears to be 100 high-res images for $349) buyers who need just a single photo for a Web page aren’t required to buy a minimum number of credits, most of which they don’t need. A 3 megapixel photo might be relatively expensive at $7, but for buyers it’s cheaper than paying $9.75 for six iStockPhoto credits, half of which will eventually expire.

Even the Software is Community-Based

The site’s emphasis on the community even extends as far as the technology that runs it. YAY Micro was built entirely using open source software. The operating system is the Linux-based CentOS. For the database management system, the site chose PostgresSQL rather than MySQL now owned by Oracle, and search is powered by Apache Solr.

Cost was one factor in the choice to use open source systems but the site’s founders were also drawn to the thinking behind the software.

“YAY is built on a community philosophy when it comes to both structure and content,” says Johannessen. “Our experience is that the open source communities attend to problems and provide excellent support.”

Yay Micro isn’t the first company to attempt to bring a fairer balance to a stock industry dominated by major players with the power to dictate terms. PhotographersDirect takes only a 20 percent cut and allows the photographers themselves to set prices. It also refuses entry to people who contribute to microstock sites on the grounds that they’re helping to damage the earning potential of other photographers.

And the photography world isn’t short of organizations that aim to represent contributors. The Stock Artists Alliance exists “to support and protect the business interests of professional stock photographers worldwide… and advocates the use of equitable business models, fair contracts and ethical practices at all levels of the stock industry.” That hasn’t stopped the rise of microstock sites owned by big stock companies with tiny payouts, tight exclusivity contracts and low prices.

But even if an international union of microstock photographers is unlikely to put fear into the heart of Getty, Johannessen’s market-based approach might just have an effect. The microstock world is both new and fluid. A site that’s willing to split revenues equally with contributors  could well attract more photographers and more images, and in turn, more buyers. It could put upward pressure on a market that’s long failed to live up to the promise to buyers of usable images for 99 cents. Microstock photographers of the world don’t have to unite so much as choose to upload their images where the returns are highest — and wait for the rest of the industry to join Yay Micro.

Does the world really need another microstock site? With dozens already on the Web, including the Getty-owned giant iStockPhoto, it’s hard to see why anyone would want to enter a marketplace in which competition is so tight. Photographers are hardly crying out for another platform on which to receive a few cents for a sale and buyers don’t need more sites offering the same images they can find everywhere else. And yet at the beginning of August, Envato, a creative network, launched PhotoDune, giving the Web another place where photographers can upload images in the hope of making a sale and users can download pictures at prices that start at a dollar. It’s possible though that despite the platform’s familiarity, PhotoDune has one advantage that might just help it to deliver buyers that arrive fast and stick around: it has a market.

PhotoDune looks like every other microstock site on the Web. Royalties are a flat 25 percent for non-exclusive contributors and range from 50-70 percent of the sales price for exclusive sellers. Photographers though need to have produced more than $75,000 in sales to earn that top rate, and more than $3,750 to move from 50 percent to 51 percent. With prices that range from a buck for an image of 0.2 megapixels and rise to $7 for an image of 14.3 megapixels (or $15 for an extended license that allows the image to be used on products), that might take some time. Currently the most successful image on PhotoDune has just 35 sales. That compares poorly with iStockPhoto where many of the most popular images over the last three months have sales approaching 1,500 downloads but the site is growing at a reasonable rate. Two weeks after the launch of its public beta, PhotoDune was offering 230,000 images from over a hundred contributors, including Yuri Arcurs.

Photographers Won’t be Exclusive

Even Envato founder Collis Ta’eed though doesn’t expect those contributors to be exclusive. Photographers, he expects, will think of PhotoDune as one more place on which they can sell their products rather than the only place on which they’ll offer their photos.

“To be honest, although we have an excellent exclusivity program which I highly recommend, I think the majority of our contributors to PhotoDune are going to be non-exclusive,” he told us. “[S]o in that respect it’s more about why sell through PhotoDune in addition to usual outlets.”

And the answer to that question is that while PhotoDune is new, the company behind it has been around since 2006 and owns a network of nine creative sites that includes Themeforest, a marketplace for WordPress themes, Creattica, a design site, Rockable Press, a publishing firm, and FreelanceSwitch, a blog for freelancers. Together, its sites have more than a million members, many of whom are buyers as well as sellers. A WordPress designer, for example, may buy images on PhotoDune to use on designs sold on Themeforest, a trend that Ta’eed says is already happening with positive results all round.

“We have a lot of active buyers and it’s good for us and them if they never need to leave our network to fill their creative needs,” he says.

So PhotoDune differs from other new microstock sites by not running after a market already spoiled for choice but by offering a market its already to created to photographers looking for a more efficient way to find buyers.

Build a Microstock Brand

That’s a big advantage, and it’s helped by the way in which Envato tends to promote both its services and the individual contributors to those services. PhotoDune’s account system, earnings and balance work cross the network, the forums are integrated and all of the marketplaces are promoted across a series of blogs. These include the Tuts+ network which reaches some three million unique visitors a month, and AppStorm which reaches another million.

Those blogs sell the services as a whole but the sites also allow individual creators to promote themselves directly. Photographers, for example, can build a profile page which shows off their portfolio and — no less importantly — allows buyers to follow the authors they like, receiving a feed of new items on their home page every time they log in.

“That sort of thing encourages buyers to support their favorite photographers and item authors,” says Ta’eed.

It’s more important than it sounds. Yuri Arcurs has talked of the valuable role that returning customers play in his business, bringing a level of stability to his business from people looking for an image with guaranteed quality. PhotoDune’s ability to allow contributors to build a relationship with buyers then, even if some of those buyers are also sellers, could be another strong reason that photographers will place their images on the site.

When Collis Ta’eed began adding PhotoDune to his company’s network of sites for creative workers, he talked about the industry with his father-in-law, a photojournalist and stock photographer who photographed the Six-Day-Way and conducted photo shoots with Billy Joel and Isaac Asimov among others. It’s an industry that has seen a lot of opportunities, he told us, as well as” a few cases of big corporations not always doing right by the photographic community.” The Internet, too, he recognizes, has brought change to the industry.

Microstock is certainly one of the changes that the Internet has brought to the photography industry. Some of those changes, such as the opening to enthusiasts, has been positive, while others, such as the lowering of prices, have been less happy. Whether PhotoDune’s contribution is good for photographers remains to be seen but if it weakens the power of some of those larger corporation also involved in microstock and helps photographers make a few more sales then that can’t be bad. And if it also enables photographers to build relationships directly with buyers, and generate more stable income, then that has to be even better.

The Internet doesn’t need another microstock site. But if Envato’s million members need images, then photographers will need to join another microstock site to deliver them.

Photography: Yuri Arcurs/iStockPhoto

Amateurs have invaded the photography world. They have limited skills, little talent and wouldn’t know a great photo if it were pasted on a billboard next to a headline saying “Great photo!” They’re responsible for bringing down the price of photography for everyone and it’s their fault that the same dull images of grinning models and headset-wearing women appear on page after page and ad after ad. And that’s just the buyers.

There are no figures that indicate the percentage of stock photography bought by part-time business builders rather than professional image editors but the corollary of the decline of editorial photography has been the rise of online image use. It’s that demand that underlies the rise of microstock: low-cost images for businesses, particularly websites, with little income, no budget and often one person who does everything from planning the website to answering the phones, including buying the pictures. Professional photographers might complain about the growth of enthusiasts with folders full of cheap images of variable quality but the same complaint applies to the people who buy those images. Stock buyers are now as likely to be part-time enthusiasts rather than full-time professionals as the contributors themselves.

The effects of part-time buyers buying from part-time sellers though are clear too. When a microstock image sells several thousand times, it becomes both ubiquitous and copied. When producing images is always a gamble, being able to see that an image is popular provides useful insight into the thinking of customers and the kinds of images they consider worth purchasing. Stock sites’ own willingness to reveal the number of downloads an image has generated — an important consideration for those buyers who don’t want overused photos — helps contributors to understand market preferences. When sites reveal trends, they’re going out of their way to push contributors towards producing images that are commercial but not original.

Some Customers Do Care

Sometimes though buyers will push back. Corey O’Laughlin, a content marketing specialist at MarketingProfs, a membership site that teaches marketing techniques to small business owners — exactly the type who are most likely to buy microstock images — recently offered her readers a warning list of the top twelve overused stock images. The list included a generic handshake, happy, leaping business people, a United Nations of multicultural office workers, and, of course, an attractive young woman wearing a headset and thrilled to take your call. As one commenter wrote in response:

 “Any editor that would even think of using these has displayed a total lack of imagination.”

But if that commenter is right there do seem to be lots of editors with a total lack of imagination. The image of the customer service rep in O’Laughlin’s list is a Yuri Arcurs photo called “Cute business customer service woman smiling,” a title guaranteed to hit the right buttons in stock site search engine results. If it’s clichéd, it’s because — according to iStockPhoto alone — it’s been downloaded more than 4,300 times in the sixteen months since it was uploaded.

Don’t Blame the Photographers

Photographers then can hardly be blamed for offering the same dull images again and again. If an accusation of producing a clichéd image comes with a four- or five-figure check, there are few photographers who would turn it down — especially not a professional photographer. As long as buyers keep buying clichéd images, photographers who care about the bottom line will keep producing them.

And the buyers will keep buying them in part as long as they lack the budget to buy something better. Writing on BloggerTone, a business blog, Web developer Beatrice Whelan, described what happened when she chose some stock food images for a restaurant with a specialist menu. The client, she said, was appalled at her choice of generic images that failed to reflect the uniqueness of her food.

“This restaurant hand-made their pasta from scratch every day and apparently people who know their pasta can tell the difference from fresh and processed pasta in a photo,” Whelan said. “There were similar problems with other photos I had chosen of pizzas and even the salads….The stock photos were not genuine and since the restaurant was genuine about the food that they served, these stock photos could not be used on the site.”

But the restaurant had a small marketing budget that didn’t stretch to commissioning a photographer, the best solution for a company with a unique product. Whelan’s own recommendation that buyers should use images of themselves and their own employees instead of turning to generic images of models is fine for companies with employees and an income that can pay for a photographer, but it’s not an option for many tiny businesses.

It might not be fair to blame a buyer for not being wealthy enough to commission a photographer, but perhaps it’s still possible to blame them for not being discerning enough when they make their purchases. Although the popularity of some stock images will prompt copycats to produce alternative versions, the sheer number of images available means that there should be plenty of options for buyers looking for something original.

Those kinds of images though aren’t easy to find. Microstock sites tweak their search engine results to show not just images that that contain the right keywords in their titles and tag lists but to show first those images that are new and selling. The more popular — and clichéd — an image becomes, the more likely it is to be offered and to become even more popular. Stock sites allow users to sort results by filters that include Downloads, Best Match, File Age, and Contributor. They don’t offer filters for originality or creativity.

Perhaps blame for clichéd stock images need to be shared equally then. Stock sites play their role by promoting popular images rather than creative ones. Photographers play a part by (understandably) chasing buyers’ tastes rather than original imagery. And buyers lack the time, the taste and the resources to choose images that are different and unique as well as well-made. That’s not just true of amateur buyers though. Corey O’Laughlin’s list included two images of someone writing on a clear board. Her own professional company used one of those images on a Web page.

The biggest difference between amateur photographers and professional photographers isn’t necessarily the talent and it doesn’t even have to be skill. It’s the expenses. For enthusiasts, the amounts that they spend on new lenses, on driving to locations and on buying props is the price they pay for entertainment. For professionals, those are outlays, investments that have to be recouped if they’re to continue paying out of their pocket. It’s a difference that’s been at the heart of the criticism laid against microstock photographers. The format can only pay, some have argued, if you don’t factor in the cost of production. A new statistics tool for microstock sites reminds even part-time photographers that when they’re looking to make money, costs should drive decisions and define shoots.

Created by Andrey Popov, a software engineer and semi-professional photographer, Microstock Analytics logs onto microstock sites and collects data that includes sales figures, file information and thumbnail images. Once the numbers have been crunched, users can display the results as graphs, comparing their sales across different platforms. At the moment, the system works with iStockPhoto, Dreamstime, Fotolia and Shutterstock, with more sites planned based on user demand. The service was launched at the end of May and is now being used by more than a hundred photographers. Pricing is based on usage: tracking up to 500 files is free but the price rises to $299.99 for a one-time unlimited license. The program works even with giant portfolios; during testing Popov was able to track 40,000 files and 4 million sales.

Choose Your Best Files

The ability to compare sales across multiple sites at one source is clearly one important benefit for non-exclusive contributors. Another is the ability to track trends. Microstock Analytics allows users to group together collections of images into sets in order to identify the subjects or models that are bringing in the greatest number of sales. They can then focus their efforts on the most valuable shoots and make sure that they’re only uploading the images most likely to sell, a particularly important decision when you’re producing more images than the upload limit allows you to offer.

“If you produce a lot of content every month and you’re not iStock-exclusive, you want to choose best files to upload there,” says Popov. “But that’s not easy to do because you need to analyze sales on several other sites.”

Being able to track over time as well as across platforms can also be surprisingly valuable. Popov had found that Shutterstock’s preference for new content generated more sales in the first week than the files produced later on a monthly basis. Because some of his old shoots that had sold well initially appeared to be generating little return after a year, Popov assumed that microstock images have a short shelf life and little value over the long term.

“I was afraid to invest any significant amount of money in photoshoots,” he recalls. “But when I actually got to see monthly graphs for those photoshoots I saw that they sell equally well even after one year. It would be really hard to see without software or would require enormous amount of time to calculate using spreadsheets.”

Using Microstock Analytics, he says, he was able to double his income every month for three consecutive months across each of the four sites.

That’s really the key benefit of Microstock Analytics: instead of guessing what buyers want to purchase, estimating how long a set of images will take to sell and which factors will influence sales, photographers can test different subjects and compositions, and track the results. The figures that come back, such as the longevity of a set of images, may be surprising.

Realizing that microstock images can be valuable even over the long term however, makes calculating the cost of producing them even more important. When you’re shooting like a professional and choosing shoots based on the revenues those images will produce (rather than on the kinds of images you’d enjoy creating) you need to be able to calculate the return on investment. Popov provides a simple example of choosing between two models, one of whom charges $100 and the other $200. The more expensive model is likely to generate higher sales but a professional would calculate whether the extra $100 really would be a profitable outlay.

Microstock Analytics’ most important statistics then may be its ROI number, the returns delivered for the investment in the images. The program provides two figures: the actual ROI, which is based on the total earnings earned by the files (or set of files) so far; and the estimated ROI, which is projected from Shutterstock’s first week of sales.

Estimating Costs Isn’t Easy

The problem though is that both those figures rely on the photographer’s own estimate of costs, and those expenses can be difficult to calculate. The model fee is only one aspect of the cost that goes into producing an image. Other costs are likely to include props, clothes for the models, gas, equipment and, of course, the time spent shooting the pictures as well as the additional time spent on location scouting, keywording and editing the files, and uploading them to the sites.

Producing an accurate estimate of those costs is going to be difficult. Time, in particular, is difficult to value especially for semi-professionals who are shooting at the weekend and in the evenings. But the fact that the software forces contributors to think about those figures and enter even an estimated amount to see how much their images are really worth can only be a good thing. It might not turn enthusiasts into professionals and it might not make them shoot like professional but it does make them think like professionals and that can only be a good thing for the contributor and for the industry as a whole.

Photography: maxyphoto.com.au

A photography shoot that ends with a check starts long before the photographer hits the shutter release button. It starts even before he packs his bag and selects the gear. It begins with research. Before any business, including a photography business, can  produce a product, it has to know whether there’s a market for that product and how profitable it might be. Market research is an essential stage in any venture and while it’s not a straightforward effort for photographers, with a little thought and an investment of time, it’s not an impossible mission either.

The first focus of any market research is the product itself. Photographers need to know whether anyone is going to want to buy the photos they produce. Stock photographers have a range of tools that — although they can’t promise sales — can help to predict the chances of success, assuming that the image reaches the right levels of quality.

Following the Stock Market

Some of that comes down to a general market knowledge. Agencies consistently report that buyers struggle to find images that contain broad ethnic diversity, that reflect older customers or which are realistically shot instead of posed with models. Knowing that buyers are looking for images that contain those features should help to improve the chances that a photo series will produce sales. Glancing through magazines regularly, too, should give photographers a good idea of the styles that photo editors are currently looking for. Top microstock contributor Andres Rodriguez has described how he keeps records of published images that he uses to inspire his own compositions.

More helpfully, microstock sites in particular also list the images that are now selling well. Fotolia, for example, lets photographers view the most popular images today, in the last week, over the last month, and ever. Just about all the sites indicate roughly the number of licenses an image has sold, giving buyers an idea of how likely the image will  have been used by a competitor and providing photographers with an impression of the kinds of pictures that buyers prefer to see when they search for a particular keyword.

While keeping an eye on that data will help to determine what to do with a search term, it won’t necessarily reveal which subjects are currently in demand. PicNiche can do that. Created by software engineer and photography enthusiast Bob Davies, the site offers toolbars used by both buyers and contributors to compare supply and demand for search terms. Crunching the data the toolbars produce allows Davies to assign a score that correlates with the level of a competition a picture on a particular topic may face. On a scale on which anything below 10 is “bad” and a score over 100 is rated a “niche,” the keyword “office” comes in at 0.33. “Beer gut” is currently 1,522, a good excuse as any to head back to the fridge.

Photographers can use the site both to check the levels of competition for a keyword they’re thinking of shooting and to see lists of current opportunities. Neither can guarantee sales, but both should give a clue to the likelihood of selling a stock license and an indication of whether the picture is worth shooting.

For photographers hoping to win event commissions, the research is a little harder. There are no tools that can tell them the right kinds of images to produce let alone the best demographics to target or the most effective marketing channels. Market research is going to be largely intuitive rather than based on the solid sales figures that stock companies produce even if they don’t share directly. On the other hand, the level of competition is going to be smaller too and largely restricted to other photographers in the same geographical area.

The research then will be mostly based on understanding what those other photographers are offering. For the images themselves that will be an assessment of whether they’re pitching traditional wedding photography images, edgier wedding photojournalism or edgiest Trash the Dress Photography. In practice, you’re likely to find that many will be offering a combination of at least the first two. The real challenge will lay not in assessing the nature of the product itself, which should be fairly straightforward, but in understanding how to deliver the images, how many images to deliver and how much to charge for them.

The Photography Pricing Process

In fact, for photographers, pricing is likelier to be a harder market research topic than subject. Even stock photographers need to be aware of how much their pictures are worth to buyers; with agencies taking as much as 80 percent of the sales price and websites allowing them to cut out the middle man, there’s a strong incentive to know how much to charge yourself.

But stock photographers have an advantage: fotoQuote has done the work for them. The software uses sales data contributed by professional photographers to produce an accurate snapshot of current market rates. Although it costs about $150, it does take the legwork out of the research and provide a justification for charging a set price based on usage.

Event photographers are going to have be a little less scientific and look at the contents of the packages their competitors are offering and the amounts they’re charging for them. Photographers looking for other kinds of commissions, whether commercial or editorial, can do worse than follow the suggestions outlined by Susan Carr, former President of the American Society of Media Photographers and author of The Art and Business of Photography. She breaks down the pricing process into four elements: creative fee, expenses, license, and market. Each of those elements is complex and each poses a whole new set of market research questions.

But those are questions that any photographer hoping to generate revenue from their images needs to answer — and they’re answers that should be collected before the photography session begins, not once you’ve shot the images and are wondering how much to charge for them and why they’re not selling.

Photography: gynti_46

When John Griffin launched Cutcaster in early 2008, he injected a novel idea into the world of commercial photography. A former equity sales trader on Wall Street, Griffin’s aim was to create a research tool that would deliver to the photography industry the kind of vital information that Bloomberg supplies for finance. The site would also provide a platform for the deals to be made, allowing photographers to sell image licenses for the true market rate.

“We wanted to create a dynamic marketplace much like the NASDAQ stock exchange and also give people tools to educate themselves on what the marketplace was looking for, analyze the data surrounding their content and find available market research,” Griffin told us then. “It’s supposed to be a fluid system where buyers and sellers
can adjust to what the market is telling them.”

Sellers were able to set their own price or choose an algorithm created by the site to fluctuate prices. Crucially, buyers could also submit a bid lower than the asking price, allowing buyer and seller to negotiate until they reached a price on which both could agree. The site’s launch followed two years of research into the factors that affect photography pricing, and should have created a marketplace in which all deals were fair, photographers never felt that they were receiving less than they deserved and buyers never felt that they were paying too much.

It should, in other words, have solved the two largest problems generated by microstock and traditional stock.

Bidding for Photos is Confusing

It hasn’t quite worked out that way. Visit Cutcaster now and a message welcomes you to “the new Cutcaster… a simple-to-use website for intelligently searching and buying royalty free photos.” Navigation is simpler and search has been overhauled to enable buyers to find what they’re looking for faster and to discourage keyword spam.

But the most obvious change is a list of fixed royalty-free prices on the home page that range from 70 cents for a “tiny” image to $14.95 for “XXX-large.” Credits cost as little as 80 cents.

The change is recent and was brought on by the response to Cutcaster’s flexible pricing system. Buyers weren’t interested in bidding for royalty-free images and only placed bids 6 percent of the time. Removing a bidding option that allowed the two sides to negotiate, Griffin says, has made the system less confusing.

Sellers can still choose either to set their own price for a medium-sized image, allowing Cutcaster to price other sizes in relation to their choice, or use Cutcaster’s algorithm to price all of their sizes for them. (Cutcaster sets the price for about 60 percent of images, Griffin says.) The flexibility and responsiveness though have gone. A buyer who disagrees with a seller’s price point has no option but to move on to the next picture.

So why didn’t the bidding option work? Why weren’t buyers willing to enter into negotiations with sellers to achieve a fairer price?

Part of the reason might have been the complexity of image pricing. For Wall Street brokers the value of a company can be measured in earnings reports; Cutcaster’s pricing algorithm is affected by less obvious factors that include views, downloads, exclusivity, keyword queries and time available, among other things. And that’s before you reach usage, an element that has no parallel in finance where corporate investors pay the same price per share as individual savers.

But it could also be because the prices were fair already. Last July Griffin told us that pricing on Cutcaster was stable at around $10 an image (“although $5 images sell better.”) Advertisers and designers who use the site tend to look for downloads below $10 and the average sales price across all sizes was $9. With prices that low and with thousands of other options a click away it made more sense for buyers to keep looking than to lose time talking.

“The three things that obviously effect buyers thinking the most are price, speed and quality,” said Griffin.

If the price wasn’t right, then buyers weren’t going to sacrifice speed of purchase to change it.

That dynamic though has also been shown to work in the opposite direction.

Sellers Won’t Haggle Either

Go to GoSee4me.com now, and you reach a site stuffed with keyword spam and little by way of valuable content or a useful service. It wasn’t always that way. The domain used to provide a photo bounty service on which buyers would describe a picture they were looking for and the amount that they were willing to pay for it, and photographers could pack their cameras and get shooting.

The site’s founder Josh Rothman came up with the idea when he was considering buying an antique chair online.

“The seller had some photos posted on his website, but I was concerned that there might be some flaws in the chair that the seller was not revealing in either the written description or the photos he chose to provide,” he said. “I thought to myself, ‘I wish I knew someone who lived there that could go look at that chair for me.’”

He wasn’t the only one thinking that way. SpyMedia was already offering a similar service. That site also no longer exists.

The problem with those services is that the value of the image to the buyer — usually around $5 to $10 — was much lower than the expense for the photographer in creating it. Few photographers were willing to spend several hours shooting and editing a picture for the chance — and there was no guarantee — of winning five or ten bucks.

The principle of requesting images as part of a stock service can be useful. UK-based photo library fotoLibra puts out frequent calls for images and iStockPhoto has a forum thread on which designers can ask for specific content. But building a business around the concept seems to have been a pretty poor idea when the two sides have such different ideas about the price of an image — and an unwillingness to negotiate that price.

The photography market might sound like a place in which haggling is a part of business and negotiations can take place over time, but it’s more like a supermarket than bazaar. Buyers want to take images off-the-shelf, but they’ll put them back quickly if they don’t like the price on the label.

Negotiation might work for high-priced rights-managed images but for royalty-free, you only get one chance to name your price.

Photography: NeilsPhotography

For photography enthusiasts, microstock can look like an easy way to make a little cash from the images they shoot for fun. Usually, it isn’t. Top microstock photographers plan their shoots, track market trends, look for underserved subjects and even pay models. The prices might be low, but microstock is a business and the images licensed through the sites are products that have to meet a market demand. They also have to meet the legal criteria required for commercial stock, avoiding copyrighted elements and providing model releases. Submitting hobby shots just tends to deliver rejection. But some of the images that don’t qualify for commercial use may be suitable for editorial use where they can provide visual descriptions of items and issues discussed in news and magazine articles. They could be shots of street scenes, pictures of demonstrations, even photos of tourist sites that would have little commercial use or which wouldn’t qualify for a commercial license. It’s an opportunity that iStock is now trying to exploit by creating a new category of photos only for editorial use.

“Publications and bloggers are often looking for images of products, architecture and landmarks,” says Kara Udziela, an iStock spokesperson.“There is also a constant need for photos that tell stories about travel and lifestyles or those that provide social commentary. These are the types of images iStock will now be able to offer.”

No Model Releases Needed

The images will differ from commercial stock in a number of important ways: editing must be restricted to a “moderate level and color correction”; cropping should not change the meaning of the event; shots of people should be real, not posed;  logos and copyrighted elements usually removed from commercial use images must be left unaltered; and model releases are unnecessary except for identifiable children shot singly (children as part of a group are fine.)

The images must also supply the date they were shot, the countries in which they were shot and a description that explains clearly what’s happening in the picture and, if possible, why it’s happening. EXIF data should also be accurate and complete.

Submissions will begin at the end of January and sales will start before the end of March. Buyers will apply a filter while searching to find editorial-only images, and photographers will upload their pictures in the usual way. Contributors however must choose the category in which they want to place their images; iStock will not accept two versions of the same image for both commercial and editorial-only images even though commercial images can also be used editorially. A photographer could not, for example, take a picture of a car as an editorial-only image, then remove the logo and registration details and submit the second version to the commercial category.

“Generally speaking, if an image can be used for commercial use (creative royalty free stock) it is better for contributors and customers,” recommends Kara Udziela.

Images that are rejected for commercial use but which would qualify for editorial use won’t be automatically placed in the editorial category. Because those images must include more caption information than is usually supplied for commercial images, contributors will have to resubmit them.

Nor is iStock accepting all kinds of editorial images. At the moment, the site is only accepting editorial images in the categories of architecture and landmarks; travel and lifestyle; social commentary; and urban living. It’s specifically not looking for news images such as press conferences, sports shots or the immediate aftermath of a disaster. Photographers with those kinds of photos are told to contact iStock’s parent company, Getty Images.

That may be because of the short shelf-life of news images which have to be pushed out right away. But it might also be an attempt to protect the higher prices charged to news outlets for conventional stock. The fees demanded for images in the new editorial category will be the same as the company’s other microstock images, a fraction of the fees that Getty itself demands. Stock photographers already concerned about the competition from part-time microstockers are unlikely to thank Getty for accepting images that compete with their own photos directly and at a much lower fee. And despite the invitation on iStock’s website to people interested in traditional photojournalism to “contact Getty Images Editorial and apply to be a photographer there,” enthusiasts who try are unlikely to find an open door.

Royalties Cut to 20 Percent

More worryingly, those fees will be the new rates announced by iStock COO Kelly Thompson in early September. Under those rates, iStock will set photographers’ royalties on a yearly basis instead of allowing them to grow as the inventories of veteran  contributors continue to sell, and the maximum payout for non-exclusive contributors — long considered to be the best way to improve earnings overall — will be no more than 20 percent. It’s a change that’s had microstock forums buzzing with indignation and even persuaded some buyers, who see no benefit to themselves in the lower rates and who sympathize with the photographers, to look elsewhere for their images.

According to iStock, the editorial-only collection will open a new creative avenue for photographers, allowing them to sell many of the images they already have in their portfolios but which are not appropriate for commercial stock. It also gives enthusiasts who are keen on photojournalism rather than commercial photography a way to make money out of their talent without forcing them to spend time in the studio posing models. But unless those photographers become exclusive and manage to sell large numbers of high-res images, they’re not going to make much out of those pictures. If other microstock sites follow iStock’s lead and also start selling editorial-only images, contributors will have to ask themselves why they’re accepting iStock’s maximum 20 percent when Fotolia starts at 25 percent and Dreamstime at 30 percent.

Unless, of course, those other sites do copy iStock by not just expanding their inventory of images and the range of their contributors but also by taking more of the sales fee for themselves. That really would be an introduction to the business of photography to enthusiasts — and it wouldn’t be fun at all.

Image: Courtesy PhotographersDirect

Stock photographers are being squeezed from two directions. From below, microstock images are providing a mass of low-cost competition and changing the perception of the value of an image in the eyes of buyers. From above, a small group of large stock companies have the power to determine market prices and typically to take as much as 70 percent of the fees paid by a buyer for a photo. It might not be quite as bad as coffee growing in Ethiopia but to a stock photographer looking to make a living out of his or her images, the current market conditions can make them feel equally powerless. They can’t set their own fees and they’re forced to pay a large chunk of the value of their work to middlemen. That’s a situation that Photographers Direct, a stock site, is trying to solve by using a sales model adapted from the Fair Trade movement.

The service was launched nine years ago, initially as a picture search that passed on requests from photo buyers to photographers. That service still exists, and the company also accepts commissions for its photographers, but its main product is now a searchable database of over 2 million stock images. Those images have come from over 15,000 photographers of which 5,000 are currently active in more than 100 countries. The site generates  more than 1.8 million page views a month.

Prices for licenses can vary. The average price paid is $200 but four-figure fees aren’t unusual and some buyers on the site have paid as much as $5,000 for a single usage license. To purchase an image, buyers usually contact the photographer and either ask for a quote based on their planned usage or describe their budget.

“Offers won’t generally be rejected by a photographer,” says Chris Barton, a Canadia-based travel photographer and Photographers Direct’s founder. “Instead, if they feel the price is too low, they will try to negotiate a price and terms of use which are agreeable to both parties.”

It’s Not About the Money

In comparison to the off-shelf purchases of other sites, that’s all a bit slow and clumsy, and the site is introducing an automated pricing system based on PhotoDeck. But the photographers are always free to set their own prices instead of having them dictated by the agency, and the agency itself is taking only a 20  percent cut.

That’s a rate well below the usual market rate taken by other agencies.

“Photographers Direct is not about making the most money we can,” explains Chris Barton.  “It is about doing the right thing for our photographers.”

The site, though, isn’t about doing the right thing for all photographers. Images have to be approved before they’re added to the database, and all of Photographers Direct’s contributors are professionals with the industry knowledge necessary to negotiate usage rights and deliver high res images in the formats and sizes needed.

Most importantly, a further condition of joining Photographers Direct is that the photographer does not currently have any images sitting on offer at any microstock site.

“Photographers providing images to microstock sites have damaged the earning potential of all photographers, and allowing those same photographers to join Photographers Direct would only dilute our photographers’ earnings further,” says Chris Barton.

The site, in fact, preserves special criticism for microstock sites, arguing that many new picture buyers now see the low prices and open licenses as the norm, and  fail to recognize that those fees do not cover the cost of equipment and production. They also encourage the production of low quality, “generic” images that are flexible enough to be sold many times — the only way to make any kind of income from microstock, says Chris.

Interestingly though, it’s not the prices themselves that bother Chris Barton, whose own images have been used by The Wall Street Journal, Readers Digest, Lonely Planet, Rough Guides, Thomas Cook and many others, but the low pricing combined with the open licenses. Microstock, he argues, can fill a need in the market, particularly for blogs and small businesses,  but when the same image can be used endlessly and for the same low fee, even when it’s being used on the cover of Time magazine, the system, he says, has a fatal flaw, and one that’s harming professional photographers.

The Growing Gap Between Microstock and Professional Stock

Certainly, it’s easy to see the benefit to a photographer of a system like Photographers Direct which offers all of the advantages of a stock agency but with an exceptionally low commission and the ability to set your own prices. But it’s harder to see how microstock images compete with these images. When microstock photographers produce images of “the lowest common denominator” they widen the gap between the quality of budget pictures and the excellence of the kind of images offered by the professionals on Photographers Direct. Chris Barton asks why Time magazine would pay more when a cover image is available for only $30 but very few of the images being offered for $30 are worthy of being Time covers. Usually, publications still pay the full price demanded by the market because low-priced suppliers can’t produce images of a high enough quality.

The question though is whether buyers will continue paying those prices through agencies. Photographers Direct doesn’t just provide a new pricing model, it also represents a new marketing model. The site’s new system allows photographers to  upload their high res images to PhotoDeck, set their prices and links them to their Photographers Direct account. Photographers can indicate which licenses are available and allow buyers to download once a purchase has been made. The only role left for the agency will be to put the pictures in front of buyers, says Chris.

“[A]nd that role is being threatened from a number of different directions and by game-changing technologies, which will, I believe, eventually make most traditional agencies obsolete.”

A photography stock market with no middle men at all. That really would be a revolutionary change.

One of the attractions of the opportunity provided by microstock is that photography enthusiasts can shoot the images they love and make money out of them. It turns a hobby into a passive income generator without putting the photographer through the less pleasant process of having actually to work. In practice, of course, it rarely turns out that way. The most successful microstock photographers treat their contributions with the same seriousness with which a factory owner looks at his outputs. They plan their shoots, think about the costs of creating them and, most importantly, make sure that the images they photograph match the demand among buyers, even if they don’t match entirely the kinds of images they’d want to shoot for fun. To make those kinds of assessments though, photographers need to understand what the market wants.

That’s not always easy to do. While microstock sites are happy to show their most successful photographs, and a few list the most popular searches, matching gaps between demand and supply to spot valuable opportunities is a problem. It’s a problem that picNiche has gone some way towards solving.

Created by Bob Davies, a UK-based software engineer, the site offers a number of free microstock toolbars. The Microstock Image Search toolbar helps buyers to find images across multiple agencies, lets them send image requests directly to contributors, and notifies them when interesting new images are uploaded, among other functions. The Contributors toolbar provides photographers with notifications about sales and approvals, a keywording tool, an FTP-upload drop-box for six agencies, and other solutions too.

Photographers Work Harder than Buyers

The search toolbar is currently used  by about 500 buyers; the contributors toolbar has about 2,500 users. (Usage figures for both toolbars drop at the weekends though when buyer drop-off outpaces that of contributors by 20 percent. Buyers’ Sundays, it seems, are more restful than those of photographers.) The most popular toolbar provided by picNiche however is the newer Ultimate Free Stock Photo Search Tool which looks for free images across more than 200 websites, including many microstock sites’ own promotional collections. That toolbar has about 3,000 users, runs as many as 2,000 searches a day, and has been shown to convert free users to paying buyers.

The idea for the toolbars came three years ago, when Bob left his corporate job to find something that offered more freedom and a reliable passive income, but which also had enough data to make informed decisions about future development. Microstock, with its creativity and open doorway, looked like a suitable choice even though Bob sees himself as a software guy rather than a photographer. Once he’d started shooting, he found that he was frequently refreshing his stats to check sales and monitor the progress of his portfolio. The Contributor’s toolbar was a natural extension of that experience.

“On a dull day I’d waste a lot of time with F5-itis, constantly checking my earnings rather than creating images,” says Bob. “By incorporating my earnings checks it into the browser, any activity on my computer would also be accompanied by the nice little ‘dings’ whenever I made a sale.”

Once he’d added keywording and a dropbox, he started sharing the toolbar as a free plugin for Firefox. The toolbar has proven useful enough, but what Bob really wanted was a way of measuring the gap between image supply and image demand for particular keywords. If he could identify popular niches for which there were relatively few images, then he’d know that shooting those topics would bring an increased chance of sales.

None of the microstock agencies he contacted were willing to share their search data so Bob turned to his toolbars to extrapolate search terms himself. Using a sample set of images, he calculates the average views-per-file and the average downloads-per-file for each searched keyword phrase. The result is a score that shows the probability of an average-quality image selling at least once throughout its lifetime.  A “picNiche rating” of 100, for example, suggests that an image that matches that search term will sell at least once. A rating of 1,000 predicts at least ten definite sales, although once the figures start to reach 3,000 to 5,000 they become less reliable. Enter any term into picNiche and you should be able to see your chances of selling pictures that cover that topic.

The calculations though are only suggestions based on the number of views and downloads received for a keyword entered into picNiche’s toolbars. But as Bob notes, success at microstock depends on more than choosing the right topics.

“That rating… needs to be balanced against common sense and some rational thought. A higher rating does not ‘always’ mean better sales,” he warns, “and you need to be able to judge objectively both the quality of your own work and the time/cost it takes to create/produce.”

The idea though is that better your photography, the lower the picNiche rating you can shoot and still expect to make sales. Bob, who says that he is “not a particularly good photographer,” tends to shoot topics that rate around 75-400.

“If I produced work twice as saleable as the average image, I would produce for topics as low as a 25 rating.”

Buyers are Looking for French Castles

But the figures do appear to work. Bob has about 2,000 photos spread over ten microstock sites, which he describes as “general amateur shots.” The best selling images in his portfolio though are photographs of mobile phones, keys and other items that he shot in response to his picNiche results.

Each month, Bob posts a new cloud of niches that show the most potential. Users can feed these terms into picNiche’s search engine to see the views-per-file, downloads-per-file and ultimately, the ranking. At the moment, some of the biggest opportunities appear to lie in “carryon luggage,” “restaurant dinners” and “corn dog” among others. They’re probably easier to shoot than “French castle” and “tandem bicycle” which also appear in the list. In general, says Bob, the biggest opportunities tend to lie in alternative lifestyles such as gay and lesbian couples, seniors, and of course, ethnic niches. Buyers, he says, are also looking for more naturalistic images of professionals at work — a nurse administering an injection, for example, rather than a woman in a nurse’s outfit — images that might not be easy for a typical microstock enthusiast to capture.

“There are a lot of areas you’re just not going to be able to compete without thousands of pounds of equipment and a perfect eye,” Bob warns. “In all honesty, if  you want to really earn from microstock now, you’re going to have to work hard at it.”

Photography: PNNL – Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Today’s photography market has brought opportunity to every photographer with a store of talent and a stock of camera equipment but it’s also brought plenty of competition. If prices for stock images have fallen to microstock levels it’s because good photos are now common enough for buyers to shop for bargain prices. That presents a challenge for photographers hoping to stand out in the market. More worryingly, as duplication becomes the most common reason for stock companies to reject submissions, it may even represent a closing of the opportunities that photographers have been enjoying. But while stock sites might be filled with images of flowers, businessmen and offices, they struggle to provide specific images for buyers with particularly special needs.

“Standard images (sunsets, puppies, a guy in a suit holding a briefcase) are plentiful on iStock and contributors face stiff competition,” iStockPhoto has told us. “There still is a tremendous need for specialty shots. For example, shots that convey specific scientific concepts with appropriate props and models.”

Those kinds of photos though aren’t always easy to create. Contributors to PhotoResearchers.com, a specialist scientific stock site, are often professional scientists first and photographers second, experts with access to the kind of expensive equipment necessary to shoot cells or capture microscopic images. But not all scientific photos need the kind of gear usually found in laboratories or the kind of knowledge picked up while taking science degrees. Sometimes the same type of image created by any kind of photography enthusiast can be made scientific with just a little extra thought.

It’s All in the Description

This shot of Yellow Daisies, for example, is exactly the kind of photo that many enthusiasts would be happy to shoot without leaving their back yard. This shot is of the same subject (and has sold more downloads) but look at the difference in the descriptions. While the second photo, offered as a design element, makes do with the description “Sunflower isolated, white background,” repeated in German, the first photograph offers a ton of vital information about the subject:

“Rudbeckia hirta – Black-Eyed Susan.

Rudbeckia is flowering plant commonly known as coneflowers. Close flowering relatives are Echinacea, Dracopis and Ratibida. They are herbaceous, mostly perennial plants. The flowers are produced in daisy-like inflorescences, with yellow or orange florets arranged in a prominent, cone-shaped head. They are popular garden flowers, distinguished for their long flowering times. There are many cultivars of these species. The name was given in honor of Uppsala University botanists professors Olof Rudbeck (father and son). The plant is also a popular garden ornamental..”

That kind of detail (swiped apparently from Wikipedia) changes the nature of the image entirely. The photograph is no longer just a pretty picture of flowers. It’s a picture of Rudbeckia hirta, a popular garden ornamental.

Simply adding scientific detail to the description then can be one way to move a standard image closer to a scientific photo. Another can be to include scientific tags in the keyword description. The Latin names of plants can help to do that but it’s also possible to mention the parts of the photo’s subject. iStockPhoto offers over 410,000 photos to someone searching for “flowers.” It offers fewer than 15,000 results however to buyers looking for “stamen” even though many of those other shots will show the plant’s reproductive bits too.

Scientific Images Don’t Have to Be Flat, But It Can Help

More usually though, photographers hoping to capture some of the scientific market will need to shoot very different kinds of compositions. Just as photographers hoping to sell standard stock photos should look at adverts and magazines to see the types of compositions that designers like to use so photographers hoping to sell scientific photos need to spend time looking through textbooks, nature guides and science magazines to see the shots those buyers find the most attractive. They’re rarely as artistic or as creative as the images used in popular science publications like National Geographic. The pictures in the National Audubon Society’s Field Guide to North American Birds, for example, are well-taken and interesting but to an artistic photographer, they can look a little flat. They weren’t shot to be admired though. They were chosen for their ability to help an ornithologist identify the bird in front of him. That means the colors have to be clear and the details should be apparent but they don’t have to deliver the bird’s personality or create an emotional impact. It’s a different way of shooting — and one that can be combined with a regular, artistic shoot.

It’s not just the style that differs though. Demand within scientific imagery can vary too. In general, the harder the image is to obtain the less competition the contributor will face and the greater the chances that a stock company will accept it. For most photographers though the most difficult images to shoot are also impossible to shoot. But even scientific publications have a weakness for the most photogenic subjects. Shots of interesting-looking creatures such as mantises and pitcher plants, hairy spiders and giant trees tend to enjoy greater sales than images of pigeons and grass lawns.

Events can make for interesting scientific pictures too. Some photographers have managed to build an entire career out of the moment a water droplet explodes but shots of butterflies emerging from cocoons, carnivores catching prey, and flowers in mid-bud all contain elements of action that make for pictures that are both interesting to the eye and informative to the scientific reader.

And, of course, if you’re really looking to develop scientific shots as a specialist niche there are few challenges as interesting as macrophotography with its basket of dedicated equipment, library of special techniques and yard-full of subjects, from parts of large plants to the fangs of tiny bugs. They’re all a challenge to shoot, they’re accessible, and many of them are commercial too.

Image courtesy: Veer

Veer Marketplace, a microstock element within stock site Veer, is currently paying photographers for every contribution that they approve. The rates vary according to the number of images accepted, whether the photographer is a new member or an existing contributor, and the size of their current portfolio, but can be 35 cents, 70 cents or as much $1.40 per photo for photographers who manage to place 400 or more new images.

Veer is part of Corbis’s stable of stock offerings and is targeted primarily at graphic designers working in advertising, marketing and Web design. The service launched in 2002 but began offering microstock images from Veer Marketplace in addition to its rights managed products in early 2009. Currently, searchers on Veer are offered photos at price points that range from a dollar (or as the site calls them, “way cheap”) to $655 (“worth it”). Three checkbox filters let buyers choose to search by RF, RM or microstock — an RF category that appears to need its own filter. By default, all filters are checked and the microstock images are offered in a separate single column on the right of the page, with the more expensive images dominating the viewing area. Checkouts for microstock and traditional imagery are also separate.

Veer Will Place Microstock “Front and Center”

Designers, it seems, weren’t fooled by the design. In the summer of this year, Veer will be revamped making it easier for buyers to load up on the “way cheap” offerings. Writing on the Veer Marketplace forum, Veer Community Team member Brian O’Shea has explained that the new site will be “simpler to use and more affordable to customers.” Veer will be more like Veer Marketplace whose microstock content will be placed front and center in search results together with the traditional imagery. The aim of “Dash for Cash,” the promotion paying contributors for approved images, is to refresh and enlarge Veer Marketplace’s inventory, already more than a million pictures strong, before the big launch.

“Veer is a few months away from launching a refreshed website, and we’d like to offer an even wider selection of quality content to our customers when we do,” explains Aaron Booth, Senior Director, Creative Content.“We hope to generate a significant amount of new imagery for our refreshed website.”

Veer’s approval rate tends to be about 60 percent so the odds for photographers hoping to make a few easy cents aren’t bad. The most common reasons for rejections include the usual legal issues: visible trademarks which the site doesn’t have the right to sell, and other copyrighted material included in the images. Veer’s editors also screen and reject photos from the same shoot that appear too similar. The site’s guidelines describe what it sees as the difference between “similar” photos and a “series” of photos. While the first show the same image with only “slight variations,” the second “depicts an idea in a variety of different ways.” In practice, the line between the two is likely to be a lot more subjective and leave many photographers scratching their heads over rejected images.

The number of rejections can also be reduced by shooting the kinds of photos that Veer knows buyers want. These include particular kinds of models and a number of niche subjects.

“We are especially in need of imagery focusing on diverse ethnicities and age ranges across important verticals like lifestyle, medical and travel,” says Aaron Booth.

In a neat use of Twitter, Veer Marketplace’s @veermarketplace timeline also includes specific
“wishlist” tweets based on requests from buyers, alongside its “staff picks” and networking news.  One recent request, for example, was for more images of adult education classes. (Residents of Canada and the US can also join a bonus $500 Twitter sweepstake by following Veer Marketplace’s timeline and tweeting a message promoting the Dash for Cash.)

From Microstock to Corbis

All of this is good news for photographers hoping to earn at least a little income from their images. For a few weeks at least, they no longer have to impress buyers or get lucky in search results in order to pick up a few dollars. It’s enough to produce pictures that have the potential to sell to receive their first commissions. (Veer Marketplace’s royalty rates start at 20 cents for a subscription download and 35 cents for a single download, making the Dash for Cash payments comparable to an initial sale.)

It’s also possible that the connection between Veer, Veer Marketplace, and Corbis may allow microstock photographers to move up the stock hierarchy. Veer operates as a separate entity from the rest of Corbis “and focuses on a different type of customer and photographer,” but there are channels linking the different elements.

“While submitting content to Corbis is a separate process, Veer editors do take note of high-quality imagery and contributors that might be a good fit with Corbis’ more premium position,” explains Aaron Booth. “When possible, we also try to steer very high quality content that has potential legal issues which make it problematic for RF towards licensing models that may be a better fit.”

In theory then, a particularly good photographer may find that they submit a number of particularly good images in the hope of receiving the maximum royalty of seven dollars for a single download of an XXLarge image, but find that they’re asked to become a Corbis contributor with the option of making hundreds of dollars per sale.

The question that Veer’s promotion raises though is whether they’d want to. Veer’s original design emphasized its most expensive RM images. Its redesign will focus on microstock presumably because those are the photos it has found that its buyers want most. Those buyers though aren’t small-scale bloggers and occasional buyers. They’re creative designers, professionals who use large numbers of images and buy the 9,000 typefaces that Veer also offers. That Corbis is willing to pay for microstock images even before they’ve sold but is offering nothing attract quality RM imagery isn’t just a reflection of the difference between traditional stock and the microstock markets. It’s also an indication of the way the stock industry is continuing to develop.

The biggest difference between photography enthusiasts and photography professionals is what they’re hoping will happen when they put down the camera. A photography enthusiast hopes that he or she has captured an image that will make them proud, show that they’ve improved their skills and made use of their talent and technique. A photography professional’s aim is much simpler. They have to hope that they’ve created an image that sells. It doesn’t matter how beautiful the picture is or how much they enjoyed shooting it, if the picture doesn’t pay for the time it took to create it, they’ve failed. That requirement can dictate the subjects that photographers choose to photograph. As much as they might want to spend their days shooting sunsets and landscapes, most professional photographers will also have to make sure that they focus their lens on subjects for which they know there’s a market.

Often, that means topics that reflect businesses — which also happens to reflect the type of clients who buy them. Asked what sort of pictures sell best on his site, Oleg Tscheltzoff, CEO of microstock site Fotolia, once told us that it was always businesses and “everything around people.” Put a person in a suit and put them in front of your lens and you’ve got a much better chance of making a sale.

That’s certainly reflected in the sales figures that are easily available from stock sites. A look at iStockPhoto’s most popular files, for example, reveals that while the highest rated images tend to be artistic and natural, almost half of the fifteen most downloaded – the images that buyers actually paid for — contain people.

Not all of those photos are business-related (although more than half are, and two show families) but what they all have in common is that they communicate clearly. To sell multiple times, a stock image needs to be versatile enough to convey different messages, depending on the context and the text that will surround the picture. But they also have to be articulate so that whatever message the user wants to communicate comes across easily. It’s no coincidence that the most popular images on iStockPhoto include two with keywords in the title relating to “happy”, while others are particularly expressive.

Portraying one single emotion in an image might not require difficult poses or sophisticated techniques but, together with suits and office settings, it does produce pictures that sell.

Matching the Seasons

While around half of iStock’s most popular images are business shots, it’s notable that many of the others are seasonal. The most popular image over the last three months is a Christmas tree. (Look at the best-selling photos over the last month though, and it’s a Yuri Arcurs shot of a “happy businesswoman” in a suit that’s top of the list.) Other popular images include snowmen and tree decorations.

Like businesspeople, these may not be the most original subjects to shoot but there is a demand for them every year, and they need to be refreshed every year too. And seasonal images are in demand more than once a year. Christmas might only turn up in December, but businesses need pictures that reflect changes in the seasons, Easter, Chanukah, Halloween, Thanksgiving and any other calendar event that affects people’s lives. Even the Superbowl can make for seasonal sales as publications write stories about it and advertiser’s attempt to cash in on the event. Pictures like these might only sell for a few months, but in those months, they can pack in an entire year’s worth of sales.

So business pictures can sell, and so can images with clear messages and photos that reflect the calendar. Each of those kinds of photos can be shot by just about any photographer, so while they can sell, your submissions will need to be particularly good if they’re to beat the competition.

Create Exclusive Images

An alternative approach then is to take pictures for which there’s relatively little competition. Demand like this isn’t necessarily difficult to find. When Jennifer Hurshell co-founded GoGo Images it was because she’d noticed that clients were having so much difficulty sourcing multi-cultural images that they’d commission the shoots themselves. PhotoResearchers depends in part on photographers with access to science institutes to supply some of their more esoteric pictures.

But it’s not just access that can make a picture rare and in demand. Understanding can help too, and that can come from a photographer’s interest, passion or a hobby that isn’t related to either photography or the kinds of pictures they shoot professionally. It’s Andreas Reinhold’s love of cars — and his background in engineering — that wins him commissions from specialist magazines. It’s sports photographer Jerry Lodriguss’s fascination with the night sky that gives him a whole new subject to shoot, and an additional revenue stream. And it’s Sean Davey’s lifelong love of surfing that’s allowed him to build an entire career out of traveling to beaches around the world and photographing people in the waves.

It would be great to be able to say that if you photograph a particular list of subjects you’ll always have images that sell. Of course, that isn’t true. Photographers flock to fill demand and wherever there’s a need for a particular subject matter, you’ll always find photographers (both professionals and now talented enthusiasts) rushing to meet that demand. It’s not enough to produce pictures with the right subjects in them; to make sales, you also have to create photos that are shot the right way, at the right level of quality and that convey the right message.

But there are topics that are more in demand than others. Whether you decide to compete against the many photographers who put models in suits and hold clipboards or focus on a passion that allows you to bypass the masses and fill a niche, the only way to actually generate those sales is to consistently create good pictures.



For most photographers, seeing their photo on the cover of a book should be a highlight of their career. It’s the cover that does the selling so when a publisher decides that their image is powerful enough to attract attention and pull in buyers, it’s a sure sign that they’ve take a great photo. They’ll be able to see their picture on the shelf every time they walk into a bookstore, enjoy the feeling that customers are placing it on their own bookshelves… and the remuneration should be nice too. It doesn’t always work out that way though. Now that images are available on microstock sites, photos are appearing on book covers without photographers being aware of the sale, without being credited for the picture… and without receiving pay that would even cover the price of a latte in Starbucks.

Weldon Owen’s Snapshot Picture Library series, for example, are 64-page children’s books made up of around 70 pictures and 800 words of descriptive text. Altogether, the series covers 26 topics including tractors, trucks, birds and puppies. The photo credits on the back cover of the Sea Creatures title list are typical; they describe the sources as Dreamstime, iStockPhoto and Shutterstock.

The Price Was “Pathetic.”

The book’s lead image, showing a sea turtle, came from Shutterstock and was taken by Rich C, an underwater photographer based in Egypt. Rich had no idea that the photo was being used as a book cover until we contacted him. He took the picture last October and since then, it’s been downloaded fourteen times, all of them as part of a client’s subscription package. His total remuneration for the image, the amount he earned for all of those fourteen sales, was… $3.82.

“I realise this is a bit pathetic compared with what I would have received if the image had been bought through a traditional stock agency,” Rich commented, “but if it had been offered only [on], say, Alamy or Getty, it would probably never have been found and bought.”

Rich isn’t wrong about the fees being “a bit pathetic.” FotoLibra, a picture library, charges $314 to use this image of a turtle on a North American book cover. PhotoShelter, which uses fotoQuote software to estimate standard market prices, demands $840 for this turtle to appear on a book with a print run of up to 10,000 copies.

But Rich also isn’t wrong about the chances of selling the image through a traditional stock company. He does have pictures on Alamy, and a search for “turtle” will produce one of his photos. A buyer who sets the results page to show 120 pictures can find it on page 22, by which time he will have seen 2,520 other pictures of flippers and shells. It’s no surprise then that while Shutterstock has given Rich a total of 5,800 downloads since he joined last August, and “an income of a few hundred dollars every month” on top of the fees he usually charges for commissions, teaching and guiding, Alamy has given him just one sale.

“It would be great if I could sell on traditional stock agencies and get a good payout and credit every time one of my photos was used on a book cover,” says Rich. “Unfortunately, it is near impossible for a beginner photographer to first get represented by one of those agencies, and second to have their images shown someplace where buyers will actually get to find them, so in that situation I turned to microstock.”

Microstock Creates New Markets

You could argue then that microstock is doing exactly what it’s supposed to be doing: enabling new photographers to get their foot in the door and begin earning from their images, even if the amounts they receive for each sale are small. You could even say that microstock’s low prices are creating entirely new markets for those images. According to fotoQuote, a full page image used in a book with a print run of up to 10,000 copies costs $420. With 67 such images and three cover photos, Weldon Owen could have found itself spending up to $30,000 on photos for each of the titles in its Snapshot Picture Library series. Although it’s likely that the company would have been able to negotiate lower fees, it’s certainly possible that those expenses would have made the series unviable. The publisher wouldn’t reveal sales figures, but the books aren’t bestsellers.

That isn’t true though of C.J. Sansom’s Dissolution, the first in a series of historical thrillers featuring medieval lawyer Matthew Shardlake. The books have been commissioned by the BBC and will star Kenneth Branagh. One version of the cover however uses an image of an old book shot by Vladimir Stretonovic, and was bought from Shutterstock. Other books in the series use similar pictures even though, with a high-selling title, publishers Macmillan would have been able to choose from a broader range of suppliers.

For publishers then, microstock sites are providing a chance to create book series with low print runs and, when suitable, low-cost covers even for successful titles. But microstock isn’t replacing traditional image sourcing entirely. Not all covers are sourced from microstock sites and even Weldon Owen is now developing a new photo-based series that will license images directly from photographers. Executive Editor Elizabeth Dougherty says that she is looking for photographers with collections in areas ranging from celebrity bridal gowns to bicycles to sunsets. To apply, photographers can send a letter of introduction and a link to site that displays their work to elizabethd@weldonowen.com. And the fees for non-exclusive worldwide rights?

“…are fair,” she told us, “but on the lower side for promotional books. We try to make up for that by buying in bulk and establishing ongoing relationships with photographers – and as important being nice and fun to work with.”

With the right pictures, you might even find yourself with the cover.

UPDATE:
We’ve removed the photographer’s full name and link from this post at his request after he received angry emails from stock photographers blaming microstock for their loss of earnings. That is not acceptable. Microstock is here, it’s growing and stock photographers need to adjust to the new marketplace if they’re going to remain successful. Blaming individual photographers for making use of that marketplace is discourteous, disrespectful and it’s not going to help bring that success.

Photography: Sadik Demiroz/Shutterstock

It took Shutterstock two years to gather its first million images. It took the company just over three months to increase its library from five million to six million photos. That growth represents an acceptance rate of around 70,000 new photos every week — and yet, Shutterstock says, it continues to reject more than 60 percent of the submissions it receives.

Shutterstock’s landmark was reached at the end of February 2009 but more interesting even than the fact that photographers are submitting to the company at a rate of 112,000 photos a week was the photographer who created that six millionth photo. The image depicting flowers on the British coast was taken by Turkish photographer, Sadik Demiroz.

Unlike many of Shutterstock’s 144,000 contributors, Sadik is not a part-time shooter hoping to earn a little extra cash from his  hobby. He has an MFA in Photography from Savannah College of Art and Design, and teaches in the Fine Arts Faculty of Maltepe University, Istanbul. In the fifteen years that he has been shooting professionally, Sadik has had seven solo exhibitions and his images have picked up more than 200 awards, including Best of Show at the Hasselblad Austrian Super Circuit and the Gaudi Medal at the 39th Gaudi Photographic Exhibition in Spain. He has been selling his images through traditional stock companies since 1997 and shoots every day, sometimes placing his images on stock companies, sometimes on microstock and often working directly with clients as a commercial photographer.

If You Can’t Beat Microstock, Join It

While many professional photographers remain appalled at microstock’s low prices, others, it seems, have decided that the best response is to join in.

“Microstock represents the direction in which the industry is moving,” explains Sadik. “I chose microstock as a sales channel because I believe it represents the future of stock photography and I want to be a part of it.”

At the moment, microstock represents only a small part of Sadik’s photography earnings. Forty percent of his sales still comes from traditional stock and just 15 percent from microstock. But Sadik has only been submitting microstock images for five months during which time he’s managed to create a 1,100-strong portfolio at Shutterstock while also contributing to Dreamstime, Fotolia, iStock, PantherMedia, BigStock and 123rf. Numbers, he argues, are important. The more images in your online portfolio, the greater your chances of making money. In the future, Sadik sees himself shooting only low-cost, royalty-free images.

That’s a career plan that’s likely to horrify professional photographers who see the value of their portfolios decline as buyers too turn to microstock for their image sources. No high-quality photograph, they would argue, should be sold for a dollar, and photographers who offer good images for those prices are undervaluing their work and harming other professionals. Nor do they understand why anyone would choose to sell their photos for a buck when they could sell it for far more elsewhere.

Simple Images Sell Best on Microstock

The answer, Sadik argues, is income that’s both regular and reliable. Even though the individual payments are small, the frequency and reliability with which they arrive outweigh the occasional nature of regular stock sales and the difficulty of achieving them.

“What some people might not realize is that microstock images continually produce income,” he says. “A good image posted on a microstock site is like an investment because it constantly returns profits for years down the line…. As many professional photographers can attest, it is not always easy to secure a fair payment for rights-managed images.”

The shift away from traditional stock is not entirely straightforward, however. Although Sadik expects most rights-managed photos to become microstock eventually, his editor currently helps him to choose which images he sells on a rights-managed basis and which he offers royalty-free. Good artistic photos, and even good traditional stock photos, do not necessarily sell well in a microstock environment Sadik has discovered.

“I have found personally that images that get one clear message across are the best: a hand reaching for a heart, or two businessmen shaking hands, for example.”

Sadik’s top-selling images include close-ups of food, as well as rural landscapes.

Of course, Sadik isn’t the only professional photographer to be attracted by frequent, if low-priced, sales. Yuri Arcurs famously rejected an offer from a traditional stock company to remain with microstock and stock photographer Ron Chapple has created his own microstock portfolio, iofoto, licensing his images through a dozen different microstock sites.

Ron though continues to shoot traditional stock, selling through Corbis, JupiterImages and Getty. The diversity, he argues, makes good business sense. Standing in both camps gives his company stability even as the market environment continues to change. Rights-management also allows him to negotiate appropriate usage for images that lack model or property releases.

While Sadik seems to be preparing for a world without Getty – or rather, a world in which Getty sells its licenses through iStock – that combination of traditional and microstock sales is perhaps a more likely future. Getty itself has just launched its Flickr collection, offering the high quality images it’s found on the photo-sharing site on both a royalty-free and rights-managed basis. Instead of simply placing the photos on its microstock outlet, Getty is demanding prices that range from around $50 for a royalty-free photo to several thousand for a rights-managed image depending on usage.

It’s unlikely then that traditional stock photography is going disappear altogether. Buyers still see a difference between the simple, single-idea shots that sell well on microstock and the more complex and varied photos available on stock sites. We just might find that more professionals like Sadik are tempted by microstock’s frequent sales — and that Shutterstock’s seventh million photo won’t be too far away.

Photography: Hamad Darwish

We all do it. Even the sort of cutting-edge, super-cool street photographers who are more likely to get excited by a pile of concrete than a glowing sunset will find themselves in a spot of nature, holding a camera and thinking “That will make a nice picture.”

It’s why just about every photographer has a folder marked “landscapes” (or “nature” or just “outdoors”) on their hard drives, and just about every commercial photographer wonders what on earth they’re going to do with it. With the number of landscape images available clearly outstripping demand – even if only a fraction of them are professional quality – is it really possible to turn images of sunsets, woods and hills into hard cash?

There are ways, but the pictures have to be good and the photographer has to be prepared to put in the work to sell them.

Turn the Elements into Elements

The most effortless method, as always, is to upload them to a microstock site and hope that someone buys them. The effort though will come in being accepted. iStock is just one company that makes clear that it has little interest in “sunsets and clouds” or “forest snap shots.” That’s not likely to be because there’s no demand for them at all (this image of a lighthouse is currently the company’s highest rated file and has 69 downloads) but because stock companies will only accept images that are better than those already available. And there are plenty of others available.

Rather than uploading your landscapes directly then, a better option might be to look at your landscapes as elements rather than as finished products. This image by Eva Serrabassa, for example, has been downloaded more than 12,000 times. It might well have been shot as a complete composition but it contains two parts: the girl blowing a dandelion; and the rural background. If you can turn your landscape into a background that offsets an emotive foreground – even if it’s just one you’ve pasted on — you’ll have a whole new image that might just get you past the stock site’s selectors.

Tag your Pictures

Alternatively, you can regard the photo not as a work of art but as a beautiful recording of a beautiful place – as a travel image. Usually, travel photographs are as hard to sell as landscapes (people always take their cameras with them when they travel) but Backpacker magazine and the Bruce Coleman Photo Library take unsolicited travel images, and Everywhere Magazine is now in its fifth issue and invites open submissions.

As you might expect from the publishers of JPG Magazine, selection for Everywhere is made through a combination of peer voting and editorial decision-making but the prize for selection is a free subscription and a crisp one hundred dollar bill. Obviously, your chances of winning might not be huge but it costs nothing to enter and the odds are certainly higher than if you leave the image on your hard drive.

You can raise the odds of selling higher still by placing them on a public map. Google Earth can work but Flickr’s map is probably the best because it’s a site that buyers are known to browse. Either add the geotag data to your image before you upload it to your photostream, or you can simply drop the photo into the right location on the map.

At best, buyers looking for images of a specific location will be able to find you and at worst, you’ll help to show people what the world looks like. As Anita Gould a nature photographer who geotags her images told us:

“[Geotagging] might help someone else find a Roseate Tern or a Maryland Meadow-beauty… but beyond that, it contributes in a small way to an online ‘citizen science’ database.”

And who knows, you might get luckier still. Hamad Darwish, a Kuwaiti student studying in the United States, was commissioned by Microsoft to shoot landscapes for Vista after uploading his images to Flickr. That might not happen to you but landscape prints do sell on the photo-sharing site.

They sell even better though at art fairs, and these are always good places for ambitious photographers to try to make sales. You’ll have to apply, hope you’re selected and pay for the space. You’ll also need a good selection of photos and more importantly, a good selection of prices too. But if you’re looking to sell prints, that’s always a good idea anyway.

Selling framed prints for a few hundred dollars apiece is hard; moving postcards will bring you a steady stream of small money, especially if you’re also able to place them in local stores.

Landscape photography is one of the hardest niches in which to make a name for yourself. Supply is high, demand is low and the competition is intense. If you’ve already done the shooting though, there are a few ways you might be able to make at least occasional sales depending on how much effort you want to invest.

Photography: ennor

Look through your hard drive, and you’ll find them. We all will. They’re images that look beautiful, are perfectly captured, speak volumes… and which turn up as frequently as “hard-working families” pepper election speeches.

Clichés are a part of photography. They’re often the first images new photographers take as they’re learning to use their camera and they provide stepping stones from which talented photographers can leap to the more creative, original stuff.

They might not be exciting or groundbreaking but they can make up a large part of many photographer’s image banks… and with a bit of thought they might even make money too.

Here are some of the most common photographic clichés and how you can make them work for you.

Cats Have More than Nine Lives
Flickr’s Popular Tags cloud gives it away. Hit the “cat” tab and you can browse through 1,932,883 photos of moggies. That’s a lot of cat.

Not all of them are clichés, of course. Many will just be badly taken mementoes of people’s pets asleep on sofas or lying on the grass. A few might bring something new and creative to the party. But far too many depend on a straight shot of a furry face to do all the work, leaving an image that — if you don’t know the cat — looks much the same as any other.

But cats can be expressive. Their eyes, in particular, seem to pack a lot of mystery and they’re easier to find and photograph than a fully-grown lion.

So what can you do to earn from your cat clichés?

Very little, of course, but one option is to use the best animal portraits to market yourself as a pet photographer.

Yes, you’ll probably do better with pictures that show cats in unusual situations or which capture a unique character rather than just another cute kitten, but many pet owners will be happy enough to see that you can take a technically correct picture — especially if they can’t.

You’ll probably find prints of your own cat’s faces a hard sell but try adding your contact details to your best images, give them away to cat-lovers you know as large-format business cards and you might just find that your cat clichés land you a standard commission or two shooting portraits of other people’s feline friends.

The Sun Never Sets on Sunsets
Not everyone owns a cat but everyone gets to see the sun set… and rise. And then gets to photograph it setting again.

That means gazillions of images showing blood-red skies, dappled clouds and glowing orbs melting into orange seas.

As souvenirs of a Hawaiian vacation, they can be great pictures. As examples of great photography though, they’re rarely on show with Annie Leibovitz.

But stock sites offer images of sunsets and while the best stock photographers take a novel approach to the subject, many are no better and no more original than those found on every snap-happy tourist’s memory card.

Again, you’ll always get more sales with something unique but you don’t have to do much to turn a regular sunset into a photo people will buy. The bird in this image, for example, gives a colorful scene a new twist, as do the palm trees in this photo, which has been downloaded a remarkable 731 times.

Add a layer to your sunset photos and you still won’t have a great work of art, but you might just have a sellable image.

A Handful of Flowers
Sunsets make tempting pictures because they’re pretty. Flowers are pretty too and they last all day making them even easier to shoot.

Unfortunately that means everyone does, occasionally beefing up the photo with a bee, a butterfly or a nicely-spotted ladybug.

But flowers aren’t just symmetrical splashes of color. They’re also plant species with scientific names and they could be of use to biology textbook publishers, nurseries and other businesses that work with nature.

PhotoResearchers is one company that specializes in scientific pictures and markets images of flowers. They demand captions that include lots of detail about the flower itself, so you’ll need to know exactly what you’re shooting, but if you’re familiar with plants and especially if your image shows off the inside bits as well, you might be able to sell your flower shots to the natural sciences.

Rings on Fingers
Perhaps the biggest cause of clichés is weddings. What, after all, could be more clichéd than a ceremony with a strict dress code, a set routine and a stack of images that the bride, the groom and the family expect to see in the wedding album?

Unless, of course, you regard the whole wedding process not as a cliché but as a timeless event that despite its repetition still carries plenty of meaning.

Some wedding photographers might be looking for new ways of shooting an old subject but most are happy to photograph the formals, the bouquets and the rings on interlaced fingers because they know that that’s what their clients want, enjoyed in the portfolio and will pay for after the ceremony.

And that’s really the point. It’s never anyone’s goal to create a clichéd image but it does happen and may even be demanded by clients. As long as you can also branch out into photos that do more, the odd common shot isn’t terrible. It might just mean you’re another of those hard-working families.

There’s been some sniggering going on lately. We’ve heard it. It came from some parts of the established photography industry, from the people who have traditional photography jobs, people who only deal with professionals and who only supply images for major publishers.

When they heard that Lucky Oliver, a microstock site, was shutting down, they couldn’t wait to announce the death of the low-cost photography model and breathe a sigh of relief that the old way of selling images was safe.

Maybe they’re right. It’s possible that microstock isn’t sustainable, that selling image licenses for a buck a piece isn’t going to make profits for anyone. It’s more likely though that Lucky Oliver’s problems were specific. It’s certainly inevitable that with around a dozen companies all offering exactly the same service, those who aren’t careful with their costs won’t be able to compete. Just as early dating sites consolidated while others sank, it’s possible that we’ll see the same process in microstock until we’re left with a few major players such as iStock, Fotolia, Shutterstock and Dreamstime. It’s possible that in the future, there will be fewer microstock sites but they’ll be bigger and stronger — and the uploading will take less time.

But maybe we should join in the celebrations. After all, no business model is perfect for everyone and microstock has its problems.

How Much?!
The first problem, of course, is the unrealistically low payments. Lee Torrens, a microstock photographer who tracks his results on MicrostockDiaries.com, has found that on average the most he receives per image is just 30 cents. As Lincoln Barbour, a commercial photographer, points out, once you’ve factored in the price of equipment and shooting time, at that rate you have to sell an awful lot of licenses to cover the true costs of creating the photos.

It’s unlikely that many contributors do. Fotolia, for example, has around 50,000 photographers but according to Oleg Tscheltzoff, the company’s co-founder and President, only fifteen of them generate over $200,000 a year although several are close to that figure.

Even if 50 of Fotolia’s photographers were making six-figure incomes that would still mean that your chances of making good money were only one-in-1,000. And as Lincoln Barbour would no doubt be quick to point out, that’s income, not profit.

Those photographers who are successful though treat microstock as a business. They upload thousands of images each month and employ teams of people to arrange shoots and edit the photos. Yuri Arcurs, Fotolia’s top-earning photographer, told us that he spends $10,000-$11,000 a month on salaries for his assistants alone.

If it wasn’t profitable though, he clearly wouldn’t be doing it, and it’s telling that Yuri turned down an offer from a traditional stock company in order to enjoy the benefits of multiple small sales through microstock.

Nor are the other 49,950 photographers on Fotolia necessarily losing money. The appeal of microstock is that anyone who owns a digital camera can now earn cash from it. The “costs” that microstock’s critics count then aren’t true professional expenses because the equipment wasn’t bought for professional reasons. It was bought to have fun and any income that results is then profit. That’s always going to be true for the bulk of microstock photographers, whether they’re making $3,000 a month or just $3.

Why Pay More?
That though causes microstock’s second problem: that the large number of amateurs shooting for fun and treating money as a bonus rather than a way of paying the mortgage devalues commercial images and makes earning a living harder for professionals.

It’s certainly true that life has become harder for professional photographers since the rise of digital cameras, but it’s hard to say whether that’s a result of an increased supply of images or a reduced demand in the photography industry as a whole. And while it’s understandable that professionals would be unhappy seeing some of their income draining away to weekend shooters who care nothing about costs, it’s hard to see why those hobbyists would care. Everyone wants to make money and if amateurs and semi-pros have the advantage of not having to cover their expenses, then that’s a situation that professionals will have to adapt to whether they like it or not.

No one is going to be persuaded to turn down the opportunity to make money by being told that it means a competitor won’t get it.

You Get What you Pay for
And it’s possible that microstock photographers aren’t really competing directly with professionals anyway. At the same time that microstock’s critics pan amateurs for taking away the livings of pros, they also criticize the low quality and predictability of the images they shoot and predict that no serious photo editor will buy them.

They’re right, of course — even if that does mean that microstock isn’t the great threat they claim it to be. Serious photo editors tend not to use microstock for serious use. They use it — and other amateur resources — largely for online use. Graham Douglas, Head of Graphics at Economist.com, told us that he buys images from a variety of sources, including the news wires, agencies and Flickr. It’s notable though, that photos from Shutterstock turn up frequently on the company’s blogs — pages which are provided free for readers and which presumably generate little income. It’s unlikely that the publication would have been willing to pay a large sum to put a stock photo on a loss-making Web page so no job was taken from a professional. (German magazine Der Spiegel operates in a similar manner. When it asked Flickr photographer, Andreas Reinhold, for permission to use some of his images on the magazine’s website, it wanted to use them for free; when it later published three of his photos in the print version, the magazine paid the full commercial rate.)

While microstock might be a new supplier then, it’s largely meeting the needs of a new market — that of websites which have small budgets. If that’s the case, professionals should have little to worry about from competition from the likes of Lucky Oliver. And while microstock doesn’t necessarily pay much per image, it can still be a useful for some people to recoup some of the expenses of their photography hobby.

Photography: Elena Elisseeva

One of the most impressive things about professional photography is the range of people who take it up. From teenagers skipping college and shooting bands between trips to exotic locations, to former surf fans who have found a way to turn a couple of hobbies into a one full-time job, the background of the people who choose to generate an income from images can sometimes be as interesting as the pictures they take. With a Ph.D. in physics from Moscow State University though, Elena Elisseeva might well have the most impressive pre-camera resume of all. After working in a number of research and corporate jobs in Canada, she eventually turned to a passion she had enjoyed since her teens. She took up stock photography full time.

Elena submits her images to nine different stock sites each month, including iStockphoto, Crestock and Shutterstock, and is close to winning Sapphire ranking at Fotolia, which means that she has sold almost 50,000 licenses at that site alone. Only four photographers are ranked higher, including top stock contributors Yuri Arcurs and Andres Rodriguez.

Simple, Clean… and Commercial
Elena describes her images as “simple and clean,” and tries to ensure that they each have a clear concept or message which can be easily used by buyers. The picture above, for example, contains just three elements: the water, the leaf and the stone. The one below portrays one emotion clearly. All of those of those factors enable Elena to meet her client’s demands… which more than shooting attractive and technically sound pictures is what stock photography is really all about.

“As in any business, you have to think like your customers. Understanding what they want and fulfilling the need is the key,” she says. “I find that images that have a clear concept or message perform better.”

Like many photographers, Elena asks friends and relatives to pose for free but also hires professional models for some images. In addition, her website offers free family portraits in return for a signed model release that would allow her to sell licenses to use the photos, a clever strategy and a good way to combine portrait photography with the passive income that can be generated through stock.

Elena only uploads around 200 pictures every month though. That’s a relatively small amount for a full-time stock photographer — Ron Chapple told us that his studio, consisting of two photographers, produces as many 1,500 sellable images in a good month. Elena explains that she prefers to focus on producing a few high quality images than shooting larger numbers of mediocre photos.

“I can tell that the number of downloads does go up with consistent uploading of quality images, in spite of seasonal fluctuations,” Elena says. “As long as I see an increase in revenue from year to year, I am happy. And with my current portfolio of more than 5,000 images the income is enough to support a living.”

Fotolia Rigs its Search Engine
In fact, focusing on high quality imagery is usually a good idea because of the way that microstock sites are designed. Fotolia’s search engine, for example, has an in-built bias which pushes popular images to the top of the results while dropping older images with fewer sales to lower pages. A photo will either have a good chance of selling multiple times to buyers searching for that keyword — or it will have a good chance of not selling at all.

Photography: Elena Elisseeva

The main reason that Elena doesn’t shoot more photos is the work involved in keywording, image processing and uploading. Each shoot produces a huge amount of post-production and archiving work, she warns. While it’s possible to pay someone to do at least some of that work for you, the costs can be high and will certainly take a large chunk out of your profits.

“It is fairly easy to submit a few of your good shots and have a little additional income to finance your hobby.” she says. “Making a living by stock is entirely different story. It is a lot of hard work. For every week of enjoyable shooting there is a month of processing, keywording, submitting, keeping track of images, etc.”

That can look like a pretty sober warning to anyone considering taking up stock photography full-time but what it really boils down to is that if you want to make a living out of stock, you have to be prepared to work hard. That’s a warning that every job should carry, especially when you’re self-employed.

On the other hand, hard work and commitment is something that anyone can bring to photography, even if you don’t have a doctorate in physics.

[tags] microstock photography [/tags]