MicrostockGroup

How are you doing at StockXpert?

It has been sub sales only for me in March, and the income has become the lowest among all my micro sites.

Subs flying everywhere. Incomes down. I think nobody work at StockXpert anymore LOL.

Maybe you are right?  http://blog.melchersystem.com/2009/03/03/the-dark-side-of-jupiter/

maybe there has to be a change of personnel after Getty, and like the consensus here... StockXpert is to be put to sleep leaving IS for micro.
the reviewers are meaner nowadays, and the rejections are almost identical to IS 

I'm just getting into this and having a hard time convincing myself it's worth pursuing - that there will be any market at all in a year or 2.

How long before it's 100% subs, everywhere... and after that, free with optional donation?  The term is  "crowdsourcing" and the model is YouTube.

My message of doom and gloom for today.

Right now, the price of music downloads is being kept artificially high only because the recording industry - a cartel - owns the rights to all the content, and there are really only 2 online retailers - Apple and Amazon.  Imagine if anyone could set up a new music site and deal directly with the artists, who would then have no collective representation.  The artists would soon be driven to the floor and downloads would be 10 cents, or free.   There would be no more profit in recordings per se except for their value in promoting a live tour.  I think that day is coming.

There is also a saturation factor in stock photos that is different than music.  There's a much bigger, constant demand for "new" music than there is for new photos. The subscription model is letting buyers build there own image archives which eventually will reduce the demand for new downloads. 

I could go on, about how the failure of meaningful keywording - accompanied by the accelerating growth of these image banks -  is leading to "search fatigue" which is driving buyers to subscriptions, because it's too hard to find an image at the time you need it...

But let's think positive. Hey, how about that stock market...

Good points. As always, reality is endlessly complicated and the future is impossible to predict. And I know nothing about buyers outside of one contact in the advertising/catalog business.

I think what bothers me the most is the terrible performance of keyword search on these sites. I shoot objects, and if I can't even find my own pictures, how can anyone else? The example I've cited before is: I did a photo of an old "instant" camera, then searched for "instant camera".  I didn't even see a camera - of any type - until page 3.  Another on 7. Everything else was stuff other than cameras - mostly dozens of weirdly similar images of film strips and blank photos.  I think mine was on 9.  This is bad enough now, and is only going to get worse as new images flood in, loaded with 50 keywoards of which maybe 4 describe what the image "is".

Same here. I have suspended uploading to StockXpert ...

Guess I picked a bad time to "jump in."  Does opting to NOT participate in the subscription program mean that I won't sell anything there?

I'm opted out, and although in the past months I had a reduction of sales in StockXpert (and in most sites), I still get nice dlds in StockXpert.  Today I even had one that got me US$5.  StockXpert is au pair with (IS+DT) this month for me and just slightly behind FT.

Regards,
Adelaide

I don't think there is much comparison with stock photos because they are for commercial use.  Buyers can bill their clients, people buying music to listen to use their own money.  Microstock is very cheap compared to prices pre-microstock, so a subscription might be a small price to pay for lots of designers.

tan510jomast, maybe in the future when the web is more evolved, photographers will be able to sell directly to clients. The web today has no database-like structure that can be searched - all we have is mindless keyword searching (Google).  There is no way to search web for "stock photographers who sell direct" without simply getting a thousand pages that contain those keywords - but in the future, there will be.   

Microstock companies basically do 3 things. One, they let buyers find the work of photographers. Two, they impose some quality control on the images. And three, they take most of the money.  Someday we will all be able to 'advertise' our products in a way that lets buyers find them. 

You are right about the music business. The money is going out of selling recordings - they're becoming just promotion for live concerts.

There is a thread on StockXpert forum about this problem. One has reported there that the views are coming again. I think I see the same, some of my images today have a few views.