MicrostockGroup

No digital cameras and the internet are the biggest threat to macro stock, the vast majority of the old school travel stock photographers still haven't grasped the basic fundamentals of why their income is dwindling, and you see the same old arguments time after time which normally results in them blaming micro shooters for under selling themselves.

How many times have you seen this type of comment from an old school 'machine gun travel snapper' -

 "No way would I sell my images for a dollar, it costs me xxxx to fly to xxxx location, add the cost of my equipment and expenses and I'd be out of pocket"

They still haven't figured out yet that even though it costs them money to fly to a location and shoot their stuff, with the advent of affordable good quality digital cameras a local guy can get the same shots and most probably better because of local knowledge and being able to shoot when the weather suits. Their style doesn't require any form of skill because it's mainly reportage (I'm being polite here) which any person with a camera can shoot.

The old days are gone and in time so will a lot of the old ways.

IMO the big macro agencies will survive because there will always be a need for exclusive or RM imagery, however the destination scenic travel shooters will see less and less of those sales.


 

You must be looking at very different searches to me. Try a search on 'food isolated' at both SS and Alamy. On Alamy you get 22K results, on SS you get nearly 10x more. The SS images are, at least to my eye, generally of a significantly higher standard in variation, composition, vibrancy and the quality of the isolation __ there's no comparison. You can have a months subscription (750 images) at SS for about the same cost of a single license at Alamy too (as well as 10x the choice).

I notice that on Alamy my default search results are hugely dominated by one photographer. Ironically it is the same guy who was kicked off SS about 18 months ago for trying to game the system by uploading the same images up to 6x each. Silly boy __ that'll have cost him. Again try a search on 'sardines isolated' on both sites to see his stuff and then what a transparent meritocracy produces.

At least on SS with the default search order you are getting a fairly reliable indicator of what the buyers are choosing __ if there's a lot of similar type images then it's because that's what they're buying. I've no idea what I'm getting on Alamy but what they're showing me is not very impressive.

@ Zeus - I think you are right on that one. Many but not all Macro shooters work that way so it's not just necessarily "you get what you put into it".

@gostwyck

I doubt that anyone can consider food shots as a niche. Again I might have worded that wrong.

I'm talking about shots of an award winning purebred German Shepard, jumping over a pile of fallen leaves on a sunny autumn day with motion blur for example.

Like I started this thread: Alamy takes almost everything. Therefore quality is overall a bit on the lower end. And it's nearly impossible to compare a macro agency with a micro agency.

You will find good food stock on macros but of course it's relatively "easy" to photograph a nicely prepared meal. For instance you don't need to hire 3 models or rent a huge studio... That's the reason why shots of that kind end up on the micros. There are 3 times more underwater shots on Alamy than SS the list goes on.

It's not about which agency has the most shots of whatever. It's about what trad agencies are out there that accept non-exclusive material...

$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.

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.

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.

gostwyck,

Not really, there was a cost of doing business and the picture existed for the client to see ahead of time exactly what they were buying. Do you think they had no knowledge of commissioning a photographer?

It's true. During my time in an advertising agency our clients had the $$$ for top notch images from RM agencies. They wanted RM back then and they want RM now - it's a matter of their business ethics and how they want to be perceived. In order to be unique you have to go RM.

I see Yuri's images eeeverywhere and that's good for him but I also know that those clients didn't spend a lot of money and also don't care (or don't know) how many more times these pictures are being used elsewhere. Whenever I see his images online for instance on a web hosting site where one of his models is wearing a headset (in the customer service section...), I know that she isn't working there. Not that I didn't now that other images at other sites actually display their real employees but in the end you want to present a unique and individual business. It turns into something generic. It feels more fake than other images that I haven't seen before. I hope you get my drift.

Another example. Take a portrait. It happened many times already where funky companies took microstock portraits for all kinds of weird ads. Porn sites, medical ads (hemorrhoids or STDs), political ads. So it could happen that one person is an online prostitute, who has an STD (go figure...) and campaigns for the program of a local politician. Serious businesses and advertising agencies take precautions so that never happens

Maybe the prices came down during the years but still if the buyer wants to have an image of a business team consisting out of one afro-american male, one caucasian female and an asian male in a high rise building, during a meeting so you can see the Empire State building right behind them, then there is no way around an RM agency.

That's what Zeus also meant. Some shots can not be done with a low budget - period. To isolate your apples and cell phones it doesn't matter how much or little you spend - it's still gonna be an isolated object. If you have Yuri's model gang doing their thing in a bright office is one story but it won't replace a shot of 3 business people at Times Square, if that is what the client wants.

Sometime the details make a huuuuge difference.

We have all diverted now from the original discussion (thanks dalbore for your contribution), but here we go.

It's interesting to see how some people ridicularize the macrostockers who demean microstockers and at the same time they demean macrostockers.  Some confuse grain with noise.  Some think "old timers" had no skills.

Images may have costed too much in the past, true. But they cost way low now too. I don't see the benefit microstock did to the photography market if most buyers were the same that in the past would pay 3-digit for a specific image.  The good, excellent in fact, contribution of microstock was to bring new buyers that would otherwise never purchase an image because they would not afford it. 

I don't feel any joy or pride to see AOL using an image of mine purchased from a subscription when they could have paid a lot more from an "old-timer" image.  The "designers" charge a lot for their work and am I sure the cost of a US$10 image in lieu of a cheap subs would not affect the client's budget - yet they prefer to save that instead of supporting a colleague.

It seems more a pride in having taken the sale from an "old timer". 

Thanks Oldhand...    and to all others...  It would seem that the old paradigm  that Getty, Jupiter and Corbis being the center of the universe has quickly and significantly  faded in the last few years....  it would appear that I should spend some investigational time taking 'look-see'  and your many suggestions.

thanks to all  ..   =tom

microstocks already peaked and as you see by yourself they are quickly diversifying their
business adding audio, video, subscriptions, and who knows what they've in store for tomorrow.

as a matter of fact photography alone can easily lose its status of core business for some micros.

anything that can be sell in digital format will be tried and sold, sort of what are doing RedBubble or
DeviantArt and other niche art sites, and one day micros could become a sort of E-bay ranging from photos to mousepads and prints : that's the trend i'm seeing now and there's no reason for them to stick only with photos.

a good idea would be to sell articles as well for instance, it could be a great deal for journalists and bloggers, and some sites already do that but none of them has the brand of iStock or SS.

macros : only the big guns will survive.
and the logic is simple : to recoup a 50% loss due to micros they need to double or triple their database, and i'll not be surprised if Alamy will reach 50 millions photos online.