Simple Question  (or maybe not).
   I've been around for awhile now and have been relatively successful in the micros, being with as many as 9 at one time ( now down to  6). I've been published magazines, books, and have been doing well marketing and selling direct.   
    Early on in my micro  'career'  I sent materials to Jupiter and Getty..  I was basically told by them both... they liked the work, but of course,  it was too small, come back when I was shooting larger files.
   I've been shooting with my 5D Mk II for a while now and feel comfortable with the  results and am now considering the macro market.

Simple question for my photog brothers and sisters that are with macro agencies...
your opinions, observations, pro/cons.... etc

Getty,  Jupiter, Corbis...     who are you with, would you change if you started over? 

I am for the most part  landscape, nature.

Any thoughts  & advice would be appreciated.   =tom

PS: There are many agencies around, the key is: who sells?

I think that macro agencies take a much bigger commitment than most people are willing to give.

Some macro agencies are not that good and others, exactly like micro, have to be worked a certain way to make any money from them.

But of course you can also rake in thousands of $$$ for a single RM sale. I'd assume though that those sales mostly appear for really, really ambitious and famous photographers that have connections, reputation and most likely a studio etc.

Quote from: antoniodalbore on June 09, 2009, 03:06

About the RM agencies I don't know yet what will happen in the future but for the time being I see is that my revenue from RM is falling while those from RF is ramping up.

Of course it is because that's what's happening in the overall market. I've just done an example price check for the use of one image from each of your portfolios for a billboard campaign. I was quoted about $2500 for the highly-restrictive, once-only, answer-10-questions usage of the RM image __ and about $15 for the no-questions, use-as-many-times-as-I-like RF image. That's 166x more expensive for the highly-restricted option and such a huge differential makes little sense to me (both images were taken in China btw).

As it happens there's a bill board campaign in my local area (one them just up the road from my house) which features one of my own images. The image is one from a farm animal series I took a couple of years ago. So far the series have sold about 200x on IS and I've also had 4 EL's at SS from one of the images. I would estimate that so far the series has earned me about $600 and should go on to earn much more. I was just driving past a field when I saw the potential and I stopped for maybe 15 minutes to take a few shots __ of course I wish I'd taken more now. I actually remember thinking as I clicked the shutter "That's a $100's ... that's another $100's ...". Easy and not particularly unusual either. I feel quite well rewarded for my efforts. Why do I need to demand $100's for each useage?

I cannot find the motivation to 'explore' the macro market as I just don't think it has a long-term future. Sure, they'll always be niche agencies for highly-specialised subjects, but not for the mass-market stuff that probably accounts for 99% of sales. I've spoken to a few of my fellow microstockers who have put time and effort into building an RM portfolio and without exception they report that earnings per image are well below what they get from their micro portfolio.

Micro is still relatively new __ even us 'old-hands' have only been doing it 4-5 years and it's only recently that the micro libraries have grown to the size from which to seriously compete with macro. It's only just begun. Give it another 5 or 6 years (maximum) and the 'macro market' will simply not exist as we know it now.

SS currently has a library of 7M images and, at their current rate of growth of 90K new images per week (which has actually been steadily accelerating), will have over 30M by 2015. What subjects/needs won't be covered within that?

When major macro players like Iofoto and many others start feeding the micros with thousands of images then you know that the writing is on the wall. It is surely only a question of 'when', not 'if', that at least one significant macro agency like Alamy will be forced to drastically revise their pricing structure to compete head-on with the micros. When that happens the rest will collapse like a pack of cards. The thousands of smaller agencies, unless they are highly-specialised in something like botanical images or insects, will just disappear.

They'll be very few photographers selling individual licenses for hundreds or thousands of $'s in 5 years time. The smart ones will recognise the direction the wind is blowing and adapt their business model accordingly.

And macro shooters don't seem inclined to give specific guidance on which agencies are worth the effort.  

Micro is the single biggest threat to Macro ever - period. I am jumping ship.

When you check various portfolios at Shutterstock, you quickly realize that 8 out of 10 almost look identical. Their best sellers could be from each others portfolio.

Some really creative contributors come up with new unique ideas but seriously. There are those waves of concepts. A year ago it was the floral design vectors or all the grunge vectors. Now you have the vectors with 3 colored arrows pointing up or 4 colored backgrounds with silhouettes of people dancing in them.

Out of those 90.000 images per week there are too many newbies (with inferior stock quality - not useless but not a real competition either) and lots of people copying each other.

So I think it doesn't matter if SS has 5M. or 7M. images - the niches will still be small or not filled at all. In my opinion SS is accepting too much stuff as are other agencies. Quality has been going up but in many areas it is still sub-par. Still you see badly isolated shots with dirty gray edges etc. That stuff shouldn't be online. SS is following a different strategy rather than providing solely high quality images...

And when you look at the Trads you will see more contributors with outstanding content than bad ones. Just because millions of freelance graphics designers and ad agencies keep buying from the Micros doesn't mean that thousands of big corporations don't need exclusive or RM material for their campaigns. RM is going to stay in one way or another.

I dare to mention the example editorial. Let's say you covered a local event and upload it as editorial to SS, DT and BigStock. What are you getting out of this? 10 sales? 20? If you have 1 sale at Alamy you start with more money than all sales at the micros altogether...

There is so much to consider when uploading to RM agencies. For one you want to make big $$$ by delivering fantastic content but on the other hand you want to cover niches/editorial that simply won't cut the cheese on the Micros.

A few random thoughts here. How many of you are willing to spend $2500 to $5000 for a shoot and place it on the micros? $2500 buys a bare bones shoot for 6 hours with a half dozen models. Nothing fancy. The problem with the market is nothing was ever done to price images differently based on production costs. Perhaps micro photographers who are at the top end of the tiers in the various agencies can do this but  a lower level photographers would find it hard to re-coupe his investment. These images are the bread and butter of most agencies and I don't know if the market will stop demanding them.

$5k is nothing fancy?! I'd consider spending that sort of money without a commission very 'fancy' indeed. I could fly to the other side of the world and have 6 weeks travelling and photographing in relative comfort for that. I'd still expect a payback of 1-2 years too which is reasonable for most business propositions.
It's just a question of what market your after.


Of course every business invests in it's future and takes a risk in capital outlay but that to me is the extreme end of the scale and obviously not practical for the microstock model. It is also unnecessary to spend anything like that to produce 99% of the images that the market needs.

As Lise has said microstock is all about the photographer using their guile and what they have available to produce images that the market wants inexpensively. Nothing wrong with that __ most businesses I know are ruthlessly efficient in their spending and the value they add to their product. Clearly that wasn't happening historically in the macro model which is why it has been left so high & dry. Did they reduce prices when digital lowered the costs of production and the internet lowered the cost of distribution? No, because there wasn't a genuinely competitive market. Well there is now and things will never be the same again.

Sure the prices came down then and quickly, it's just that the prices are still so much more than micro. You used to be able to get $10,000 for a decent picture of clouds and sky about 12 years ago. Then $5,000 then $2500 then... now $1.00


I'd agree that it would be good to have the ability to set prices according to production costs though __ then the market would tell us how much they were prepared to spend and in what volume.

Quote from: Zeus on June 09, 2009, 14:23

You used to be able to get $10,000 for a decent picture of clouds and sky about 12 years ago. Then $5,000 then $2500 then... now $1.00

Well that was clearly an absurd situation. For $10K you could probably have commissioned Picasso to paint you an original 'clouds & sky' in whatever colour you chose (as long as you like square clouds).

There seems to a be a genuine pride in selling images at a low a price as possible. Can't figure it.

Hi - take Corbis and Getty out of the equation for a moment - law to themselves.

I live in the UK, the umbrella organistion of picture libraries and agencies is www.bapla.org. Have a look at their site, and search for an agency by category, E.G - Travel, North American. This returns 23 results. Of these names like Pictures Color Library, AA, Travel Library, Travel Ink all stand out. You would have to look at the web sites of all these agencies, which will give you info on how to submit a test selection of images, and what there stance is on exclusivity.

Next step, head over the CEPIC.org, and look at other individual countries using the same method.

Another idea, there is a link somehere on Alamy that lists all the agencies they deal with in different countries - some may be good for you.

Choosing a good selling agency is key, a bad one will be like submitting to a ninth rate micro, a good one like hitting gold at Istock. Sorry I can't come up with specific name's - too many people read this site!

Rgds Oldhand