MicrostockGroup

Not just that. They are not brown noses as some reviewers on iStock or Crestock!

I agree with most of your points Milinz, but I have to disagree about istock.  According to all sites that measure traffic, istock's traffic is still roughly double their nearest competitors.  Also for me and many other independents who do similar volume istock is still a huge part of their income.  In my case as a non-exclusive they are 40% and judging from the month end threads there seem to be a good number of us experiencing the same. 

I agree istock can be frustrating for independents, but for anyone who is serious about microstock to not upload there is leaving a lot of money on the table. 

On my side, I have several 7Mpix images, so most of my port would be L only.  I upsized some of them slightly just to make them XL, but the majority is L.  My illustrations, perhaps, are all XL and some even XXL.  A few images were taken at 10MPix and so are "natively" XL. 

But in any case, I basically sell up to L - 90% or more of my non-subs sales.  Is your % much different?  So it seems this is what most buyers need, and therefore FT's size restriction for subs would not be a hindrance to most buyers, should they consider moving from credits to subs.

I think it should be the opposite, in a way, Lisa.  For a hobbyist, anything is a plus.  But for someone whose main income, or at least a significant income, comes from photography, isn't it a bigger problem to see your produce being devaluated?  By not uploading new images to sites that devaluate our work, we are giving them less power.

That is very true.  But I feel at some point it is important for contributors to draw a line in the sand with repeated offenders.  I pulled out of Fotolia, not because of 1 or 2 things, but because of repeated offenses toward contributors over the course of nearly 2 years.  With regard to Crestock, I closed my account because I feel 25 cent top line sub sales are pathetic.  Anyone is free to continue to contribute to Crestock.  But they should know that by doing so, they are facilitating microstock's race toward the bottom.

Let me say this clearly.  No contributor who sells for 25 cent commissions through Crestock or Photos/JUI should ever complain about microstock agencies racing toward the bottom.  The contributors themselves are racing there just as fast.

Where do I draw the line?  That's a tough call.  I'm not averse to the subscription model.  Rather I am averse to the exploitation of the subscription model through ultra-low package prices and low ball commissions.  I'm happy making 42 cents for a exclusive image at Dreamstime when it is sold as a subscription.  I can live with the 33 cent sales at Shutterstock, because the OD + EL sales are significant and I average around 50 cents per download over the long term. 

30 cents for an IS Exclusive through Photos/JUI?  Meh.  That doesn't sound very good to me, but that would leave me on the fence and inspire me to dig deeper into the situation.  25 cents for a IS Independent through Photos/JUI?  No thank you.



Dan Heller seems to be a rather controversial figure among microstock contributors.  I read his blog regularly, and have two of his books.  He firmly believes low prices project an aura of poor quality and low expectations.  There are retail sales studies which back this up.  Customers become weary of prices which "seem too low" because "there must be something wrong with the product."  Customers regularly pay up for the more expensive item because they believe the expense is suggestive of higher quality.

Heller thinks microstock agencies are missing the boat on this issue, and could make a much larger profit if they cut their downloads in half but raised the price per download by several times (just an example).  His own photo sales have not declined, and have grown despite the increasing popularity of microstock. 

Why?  Perhaps because customers who want top quality don't trust they'll get it from microstock because the prices are so low, they think there must be a "catch."  But I'll let you draw your own conclusions.  I certainly know the quality exists in microstock.  But the important question is how many potential customers know?

Yes... You're right! But, what I can do when they 'don't need' my vectors ;-)
It seems I must live without that 40% as well they must live without significant earnings on my images ;-)

Nevertheless, that images iStock sells for $25 can be sold on other places for $100 and even much more money... Why bother then?

Quote from Shadysue: "I'd imagine that most of the companies which use Yuri's kind of image are percisely not the little 'mom and pop' businesses that iStock mainly supplied in the beginning, so they'd be able to make the budget available to buy from the macros."

Sorry if I understand you wrong, but that's what I tried to say. If you have to start today a company like Yuri's you have to be rich enough at start. And if you are rich enough: for what reason should you join microstock? So who is able to fill the need for that kind of images in microstock, when all that photographers move to macrostock?
When you start as newbie you get the lowest prices for your images and it takes time to see your income grow. I don't think a newbie can ever reach the level that the topcontributors has build up in the "golden years'.
But what about the midgroup? Those who do this for years, make a living out of it... Are they able to fill the hole if the topcontributors move to macro?
What I has read is that a lot of them also are trying to move to macro- or midstock already. And it's not only the quality, but also the quantity that is needed. All stocks ask for "people, people, people', but you can not produce that cheap and you can not produce enough!
What is the reason for a midstocksite as Zymmetrical to start just now? I have read that he has been in the stockworld for seventeen years. Does he see this situation coming? That there will become a lack of high quality images on micro in the near future because of the mid- and topphotographers stop uploading them to micro. And the reason they stop with micro is that the costs to produce their images are to high for the income they get from them?
And what someone said about Dan Heller seems also true to me. Most people don't expect to get top quality when you can get something to a bottomprice. Why should buyers of images think different? We know that the accepted images on stock are of good quality, but do they believe if they can get them for 30 cent?
But perhaps stocks don't care about long term thinking. When they earned enough they simply sell it, like Istock. :-)

Deleted: Wrong thread

Actually I don't think a "real" product can be compared with this. There is (almost) no marginal cost to distributing a digital image. If your image gets downloaded 3 times or 50 times, you don't get an additional bill. The best product you can compare this to in my opinion is telephone services. Most providers for fixed lines already have at least two price plans: One offering pay-per-call (say 3 cents per minute) and one offering a fixed-price scheme (say 10 dollar a month).

Translated into a hypothetical situation this would be 30 days * 24 hours * 60 minutes = 43200 minutes per month costing 1296 dollar... with the flat rate you would get a discount of more than 99%. It still works for the phone companies because most of the cost is fixed cost - and probably none of the users are getting even close to using the full amount.

What we have seen in telecommunications market was a massive reduction of prices over the last two decades. I remember having paid 70 cents per minute at night time for an international call 15 years ago - nowadays I have to pay about 5 cent for the same call. As a result demand was growing faster than the reduction of prices and the total market volume has grown. But yes, a lot of companies made wrong decisions during that period and went downhill. Still, the total communication market has grown faster than the average economy in most countries.

I don't say this example is perfectly transferrable to the image market but I think it's closer than any comparison to buying cars or magazines.

Interesting interview with Tom Grill:

'For micro to survive successfully it will have to raise prices substantially.  Their further success will depend upon their ability to attract a higher quality of material.  This means images with higher production value.  The value cannot be put in by photographers if they don’t receive the financial returns from their efforts.  It simply doesn’t make sense as a business model.'

Full interview: http://www.johnlund.com/Interview-Tom-Grill.htm

Yes, I agree with that too!
So even very experienced photographers like he is, say the same. When prices are too low, you are not able to shoot the more expensive images anymore. That is surely true when you are new and your income from stock is low.
When stocksites don't have a view for this, there will become a lack of certain needed images and they will lose even buyers as contributors. And they don't come back...
When you left a shop and don't want to buy there  anymore for bad quality and service and you find a better shop, you will not go back to the other one when quality and service become much better there. I have seen several shops that has to close their doors for that reason. And it always started to go down when they start to disdain or contempt their customers.
You can never get a good name back when you lost it. But some people never learn!
Someone wrote on this site that one person can build a stocksite to a very succeful one and then one fool can destroy it in a year.
I don't remember his name and how exactly he said it, but it is true...
So I am curious what will happen to the world of microstock in the next few years!

Well, that's a good comparison. There is a mass market which overcompensates lower prices with volume.

Still I see a point that this is not true for all books, uhm, images I meant. There will always be a market for images that will not sell a single license more if you lower the price because the number of potential customers is very low or even one (compare it to scientific or special interest books if you will). For those images you have to find a way to figure out the maximum that this one (or few) customers is willing to pay to maximize your profit. In many cases you will find that the one customer would have no problems paying 50, 100 or 500 Dollar to use that image once.

So while for mass market images it's true to say, you can sell your image 5 times for $100 or 200 times for $5, for some images the equation is you can sell it 5 times for $100 or 5 times for $5. Difficulty, of course, is to find out in advance which images are best for micro and which are suited better for mid and macro.