Dear Microstock Colleagues,

Happy to share with you my July 2022 earnings report.

https://brutallyhonestmicrostock.com/2022/07/31/july-2022-brutally-honest-earnings-report/

Hope you had a good month.

Best regards,

Alex

Agree, and with an economic downturn on the cards more customers will be looking for ways to save, even if they are already paying pennies for content. I hope contributors wise up to the need to strangle these places by withholding our content, before it is too late.

I need to point out that most of the people who go to Freepik, wouldn't pay for an account on SS, AS or any major agency. They wouldn't pay for any image, anywhere. Yeah OK it enables them to get better free images, than if they had to search or steal them or use creative commons, but they are hardly the customer base, that buys our images from a reliable source.

No so sure Pete, what I often see in printed or online media is a combination of Unsplash content with every now and then images from an agency, mostly iStock/Getty or Shutterstock. In other words, they try to get as many as they can for free and fill the gaps with paid content. Higher volume buyers are using free sites, or unlimited download plans to lower their regular subscription fees to agencies.

I will not join Freepik unless it's to upload total Crapstock and see if I get anything back.

I agree it's tempting to dump our definition of crapstock to unlimited download plans. The problem is: what you consider to be crapstock can turn out to be a high quality image for someone else. Experienced and weathered photographers dump what they think to be lesser quality images in unlimited download plans 'just to see what they can get' and to 'squeeze out every bit of money from their memory card'. It might actually sound like a good idea, because those lesser quality images might still have a significant "usability" factor to illustrate just another clickbait article. That lesser quality image might not survive the competition at other agencies but can do well in a lesser competitive environment of an unlimited download plan, earning the contributor a few bucks. Only a matter of time before the content in unlimited plans also gets saturated and better in terms of quality, and those few bucks will become a few cents. 

It's inevitable and there's no way of stopping the process, but uploading to iStock (record low 0,3c for a sale) and Shutterstock (10c trains) are as low as I can personally go. I still submit to them because they also get me some nice sales, and at the end of the day, pretty stable earnings. I refused unlimited plans at DepositPhoto's and 123RF, and decided for myself to not upload to unlimited plans at for instance Freepik. Instead, I prefer to invest my time in getting better images that people would like to pay for, instead of investing time in producing and uploading crapstock.

When I look at pages, I see more of Getty Images than any other agency.

I just browsed the images on some German news sites I frequently go to and there too Getty is the one most often credited.
Other than that it's IMAGO, picture alliance or dpa - All german agencies and two I have never heard of before: Contentity and bitprojects. Upon googling them Contentity is another German agency and I have no clue what bitprojects is as google gives me results related to bit coins.
But none of the images used are from free sites.

I don't think I have ever consciously seen free images used anywhere but on (mostly personal) blogs.

Quote from: Uncle Pete on August 03, 2022, 10:09

When I look at pages, I see more of Getty Images than any other agency.

I just browsed the images on some German news sites I frequently go to and there too Getty is the one most often credited.  ..

it's name/brand recognition - when i tell people i do stock photography they usually don't know what that is until i mention Getty or Corbis (and occ'ly shutterstock).  so for newcomers or infrequent users those may be the sites they search first

when i google "stock photography' 2 of the 3 sponsored results are for getty & shutterstock and the first 'real' result is for SS

I don't think the Freepik concept will work, people will come for the free stuff for a very long time without buying anything as soon you remove the free section they will gone. The agency will lower the royalties for the images till something very close to zero! I think 100,-$ treshold is chosen to save the agency from a too soon bankrupt, some will reach 100,- even several times but a lot will never meet 100,-$.
The agency sits in Spain what about an Interview?

Quote from: Uncle Pete on August 03, 2022, 10:09

When I look at pages, I see more of Getty Images than any other agency.

I just browsed the images on some German news sites I frequently go to and there too Getty is the one most often credited.
Other than that it's IMAGO, picture alliance or dpa - All german agencies and two I have never heard of before: Contentity and bitprojects. Upon googling them Contentity is another German agency and I have no clue what bitprojects is as google gives me results related to bit coins.
But none of the images used are from free sites.

I don't think I have ever consciously seen free images used anywhere but on (mostly personal) blogs.

Maybe it's country dependent. I see Unsplash images being used in premium newspapers, glossy magazines and their websites here. Not always, but still, it is being used, and to my feeling more and more.

Most of them use a combination of their own photographers for interviews and local reportages, mainly AP or other press agencies for global news articles, and then Unsplash and mainly Getty (sometimes Shutterstock or .... Eyeem(!) ) for more human interest, general articles or clickbait filler. I have the feeling they use free content from Unsplash wherever they quality-wise can, so they can limit lower the subscription fees at Getty or other major agencies. But of course, I don't keep numbers or records, I only do observations (I'm one of those fools who actually reads image credits)