Unfortunately the remark "unaware the photograph was being used", "surprised to see it being used" just shows how little some photographers value their work- they only see value in it once someone else has seen the value- ie published it.

$3.82 for 14 "sales"= .14 cents a download. Any microstock contributors out there need to have a really good think about what else they can buy for 14 cents, You people have established the market by being contributors. Shutterstock and I Stock came up with an idea. I bet they never realised just how many mugs there were out there just waiting to be exploited.

It's unfortunate that the microstock model affects also those who do not contribute and who shoot assignment work

And I'm sure the bill for Kenneth Branagh's bottled water on set will be far greater than the stock photography compensation.

Welcome to the world of hyper-capitalism where some photographers fill the role of the ultimate chump on our behalf.

Images are NOT a commodity...they are produced one at a time and each one is unique...but the microstock model sees and prices them as a commodity because they are really just selling bytes via their digital interface...and the more bytes they sell, the more profit they make. Since they don't share in the cost of production of the bytes they sell, they have no reason to factor that in to the pricing of their product.

Unfortunately, photography has always been something of a vanity profession, in which the intangible excitement of having one's "vision" validated thru the choosing of that vision by others who need to illustrate a concept is the "profit" many are willing to settle for. Add to that the facts that digital shooting and the internet have so reduced the technical barriers and cost of entry into the marketplace that I'm afraid those needing to earn a livable income from stock photography are s**t out of luck...

1. The microstock agencies who use technology to aggregate content at massive scales and license it for less than the cost of production;

2. The microstock buyers who are purchasing a good for less than the economic value;

3. Parasites like the Olson dude above who feed the microstock ecosystem with false hope in order to profit from ignorant microstock photographers by selling seminars, books, and, in his case, advertising.

Dingo just loves it when people say that microstock opens up new markets.

New markets my ass!

An activity where 99% of photographers cannot make a profit despite pouring in thousands of hours of labor and thousands of dollars in equipment is called a hobby. An expense hobby at that.

The microstock ignorant cannot differentiate between cashflow and profit. They see revenue coming in and think this means that their microstock “business plan” is working! In their ignorance, they don’t recognize that they would turn a profit faster and with less risk if they worked at McDonald’s.

As for Weldon Owen willing to pay “fair” prices for cutting out the microstock middleman... just more hypocritical crap!

How much do you want to bet that Weldon’s profit margins and those of the photographers supplying them are polar opposites?

Also I would suggest Rob probably needs to work on his keywords and descriptions on Alamy in order to get his images better placed in searches. Alamy has a pretty open door re submissions but contributors have to put the effort into administration of their images if they want them to stand a chance of making a sale, particularly in saturated topics.

Alex

Of course, major companies can take advantage of these cheep prices but they are also getting images that have been (or will be) potentially used thousands of times. There is nothing stopping me from releasing a book on Sea Life using exactly the same picture as this book and piggy backing all it's sales. That is the risk big companies make when taking advantage of microstock. For some the risk is worth it.