MicrostockGroup

http://www.gettyimages.com/Flickr

It's up!  What do you think?  Some great shots in there - many which would likely not pass microstock inspectors for being too artistic. ...which is a great thing as it means there's still outlets for artistic content! ...but will it sell there?

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Nice one.

Will you close this one?

yeah looks interesting with some great shots.  I think microstock is really shooting themselves in the foot by wanting plastic smooth quality and studio lighting every time.  Microstock is where the artistic interesting shots should be allowed to shine.  Unfortunately that isn't the case.  Perhaps Veer will turn that around.

How do people get in that gallery by the way?  Do they just pick at random .... that is to say, you upload to flikr in the hope that you get picked to be included in the getty collection?

ahhh haa, now you beat me,

I was just going to post that PDNPulse link

Yeah, he did make some good points.  I am surprised and how macrostock the pricing was.

As for artistic images and micro / macro etc.  Yeah, I suppose I agree to an extent but I also think there are images that aren't serious enough for macro and not good enough quality for micro that haven't seen the light of day.  I suppose they wouldn't be big sellers on micro, but I think there could be enough market for them to provide a high enough return.

Forgive me if this is a stupid question - I don't know FLickr very well... but don't people post their photos at higher resolution?, and without watermark? I have thought about putting shots up in the past, but was worried about people helping themselves to them. And if not - if they are low resolution files, then how does Getty do the review properly? How does it work?

It's pretty simple. Getty asks for high resolution images to be submitted for review. For me many images they asked for very 800 pixels wide on Flickr.

This is kind of an interesting idea. You think that Flickr would be the last place Getty would be looking for images.

Are there really people out there who's photos are good enough to be on Getty that are totally unaware of it and just posting images on Flickr to share with friends?

Seems like it is just Flickr's way of encouraging professional photographers to post on Flickr to get some good photos on there.

One of the things Getty has changed recently is that if they selected one of your images on Flickr.....and you've already sold it elsewhere as royalty free.....then you can still submit it and simply remove it from other sites from this point forward.

That freed up about a dozen images for me that I removed from other sites and made exclusive with the Getty Flickr collection.

We'll see how it goes.....but 20% of a $80 to $350 sale seems a tad bit higher than the same percentage on a $10 sale elsewhere.

With all of the zero tolerance requirements on micros (and even Getty) about noise, artifacts, etc., are they screening this stuff for quality control?

How many Flickr people are spending any time editing out technical issues before they upload? None?

I must be missing something here.

Just to loop back to this topic.....I've had 65 of my images up on the Getty Flickr collection for sale the last six weeks or so....and here's the results:

7 Sales (three in Europe and four in the USA) - average selling price approximately $300 and average commission just under $60 per sale.  Total earnings from this new venture for me so far are just a tad shy of $400.  Half of the sales were to big well known ad agencies in New York.

For comparison, I've got approximately 250 other images for sale on the Big Six microstock sites.  During the same six week period I've earned approximately $175 combined from all sites on approximately 100 sales.

Thus, I'm very pleased with the Getty Flickr arrangement so far.  We'll see if the Getty sales curves goes up or goes down as their Flickr collection grows - but they clearly have some blue chip clients that would probably never have seen my stuff via the microstock agencies.

They claim they are reviewing all photos marked public from all Flickr members .... but with 30,000,000 Flickr members, I don't know how they are finding anything.

I was surprised they found my stuff....but all of my photo are marked public on Flickr.

Ouch, ouch, ouch.

Getty, the Macro-Istock.

It's funny though, you could have put those images non-exclusively on various Macros with a 40/60 or 50/50 split (60% you and 50% you) and enhance the chances of making more sales through more sub-agencies...

Seems like you do a lot of travel. I think you would have quite some sales with Macros... and I mean other Macros... like ones that are not being sued by its own photographers for commissions that give you chills.