MicrostockGroup

I'm having a terrible week.  Nothing makes sense.  No sales and I was expecting a bunch.  Last Tuesday I had 15 sales on Shutterstock. Today -- ONE!

I had an image selling like crazy on SS.  I sent it to Dreamstime and it was rejected.
Dreamstime acceptance ratio was on the rise, taking nearly everything.  Last two weeks ... the bottom fell out.  They don't want any of my stuff.

There is no rhyme nor reason. 

Sorry!  Just had to blow off a little steam.
Isn't October supposed to be a good month?   

It's not you Warren. After a bumper first 3 weeks of Sept. at FT (double a normal month) sales for me this month have, so far, been VERY low. Got a small port but nevertheless, disturbingly quiet even in subs. Mat Hayward mentioned that he thought they fiddled around with the search on FT toward the end of last month because he had also taken a bit of a hit............but who knows!

+1

Few moments ago I was willing to open a new topic  "Bad October, baad!" but then I saw this topic...

This month should be the best of the best, but this year will "absent" that result ... My sales are now worse than in September...

Agree with much of the above^^, except the "lower prices" part.  Prices continue to climb.  The problem is that those price hikes aren't necessarily being shared among contributors anymore, thanks to the shrinking royalty percentages.

Same here...and here I was, thinking it was because I had a raise! Everything just dropped right around that! So at least it's good to hear there isn't a conspiracy 

Yes its quite depressing, I'm new to MS and the more I learn about it the more I'm disliking it. My interpretation is that the clients, marketing departments and the stock companies are all getting rich from exploiting photographers.

For example, a client buys a 'subscription' with iStock, gets a high IQ image. 0.30c goes towards to the photographer, iStock no doubt gets a lot more through its subscription. The client then either sells the image as part of an advertising or somewhere the image ends up on pages which cost thousands of dollars to advertise in?

I was reading about TIME magazine. Apparently they used a microstock image which was bought for 15 dollars. This is for a front page for one of the most well known magazines out there making huge amounts of money from advertisements. Apart from the MS pin up boys, seems like the photographer is the loser here?

Can't say I blame you.  A couple of years ago I would have argued pretty strongly that microstock is a win/win for all involved, but today some greedy agencies are ruining it for photographers.

Have to agree with Lou though - why bother with it?  You missed the glory days...

If I was just starting out now I know for certain I would not put the work into developing my portfolio that did back in 2005-06.  Too little return on investment.

Yep, This sums it up nicely. 30 cent for you where images getting are used in hundred and thousand dollar applications. The same goes for some much of macro market now as well. "Well, we need to sell them the images for a few bucks so they don't go elsewhere".

Hi Zeus,

I agree totally with your point. The sales are down for many and the prices just keep jumping around. Soon it  MIGHT just be stock period. No upper lower middle pricing but this is purely conjecture on my part. How do we get a larger percentage per image, I only see one option make better photos than the next guy that meet the buyers needs the best, easier said than done for all of us. That seems to be the trend at the moment. You can buy RM Macro for less than some Micro so who knows where this is heading.
My last statement is fact, please pull up a Macro agencies site and look at the price break down depending on what you need the image for. I am flying right now but if someone would like to see an example I can post it tomorrow when I am home.

Best,
Jonathan

Lol

I've lost motivation recently because of the disappearance of iSyndica, not that I've ever been that hard working anyway.

I used to think about microstock as unreliable as well, but seeing it in retrospective after 3 years, no other "real" job lasted as long for me.

  The way i look at it is this:
I am selling nothing. By that I mean the buyer gets only a series of electrical impulses ( a virtual piece of pottery, if you will). My profit is anything over the cost of production. In my case, i shoot only studio shots of objects I already own or can get at no cost. I also submit images where the props were paid for by my regular clients. In this way, the images have only the time value of the studio as a real cost. Since I am only shooting on down time, this is a sunk cost anyway. So, essentially, microstock is a machine that sells a product that doesn't exist and sends me money.
   Now, if I shot models, with wardrobe and location costs; or travel images with the associated costs, it would not make sense to enter this business to me. At the PDN photo show last year, Yuri Arcurs presented sales figures showing a steady decline in the RPI of his images. Given his huge overhead, there's got to be a point soon when the downward RPI trend meets the upward cost per image trend.
    Zeus' and Jonathans point about the downward trend in macro sales mirrors my experience as well. When I get my statements from macro sales, it's hard to tell which is microstock and which is RM macrostock ( except for those fewer and fewer BIG sales).
    Still, if you can balance the cost of producing an image  with the expected return you can make money. The people who shoot every hamburger they ever ate are the ones most likely to be profitable, because the cost basis for the image is so low. Likewise the people who shoot their own family, or dog or whatever. But unless you have a pretty big family, this gets old after a while. It could be that the end game is that it becomes a business of big producers. But if that happens, the agencies will become hostage to these big collections, who may find other ways to sell images with some new technology or website yet to be invented ( and of course, there's always google image search , which may end up being a game changer after all...)