I was curious today how many people here are designers and purchase microstock images and how many people are just photographers.  It seems like there are a number of people here to both take photos and buy photos but not so sure many people just buy photos.

Are you out there?

Is it Poll Day today or something?  

Although I occasionally buy images (probably 10/year at most) I signed up as only a contributor. 

I don't buy images to use professionally and only very rarely if I want to post in a forum or slap something cute on a greeting card.  Hope that is okay and doesn't skew the results.

I do both when I have to. The thing I dislike the most with buying images, is to find "believable" or "real" people in everyday life. The smiling models in static position are annoying for most projects.

Leaf I think there have been a lot who haven't polled..I think there are a couple of only buyers on here from what has been said in some of the threads.

I'm a buyer and I dabble in selling my own stuff via microstock (sorry for the use of the word "dabble" as I know it makes the serious shooters here mad). I should probably restate that to say that I work with the images purchased by a large stock-buying conglomorate.

I work for a company that produces weekly newspaper circulars for hardware, grocery and drug stores as well as farm and fleet type stores (these are generally rural, large department stores that also sell hunting and fishing supplies, housewares, simple clothing, farm and farm animal feed and equipment, and supplies for cars, trucks, tractors). This is in the US and the clients are from most of the states but mainly rural areas. The grocery circulars are urban, high-end markets so their weekly ads are somewhat different.

An amazing number of pages go out the door every week. Once a circular is put together (4 to 30 pages) another one has to be ready for the next week. Multiply this by many, many clients. The company has a subscription to shutterstock and to thinkstock. Why? Because they found shutterstock 4 or 5 years ago and recently ran across some advertising for thinkstock and liked their prices. They know of no other microstock sellers and don't care if there are others. They need cheap images and lots of them to illustrate rural lifestyles such as people working farms in denim jeans, everyday families, single fruits and vegetables and cooked meals (for grocery ads), simple animal shots for the pet food ads, sport animals and hunters in generic clothing for hunting ads, farm animals, etc. You get the picture.

The designers go to these 2 micro accounts daily and download images, plunk them on a page and that image is usually never used again. Sometimes it is but never beyond the limit requiring an extended license. Their biggest criteria for choosing an image is how fast they can find it. They will usually not go beyond 4 pages when looking for an image. At that point they try another search or go to their other account. It's like going to a folder on a server and finding images, but shutterstock and thinkstock are now their servers.

I'm one of the Imaging Specialists at the company. I take those chosen images and prepare them for print - convert to cmyk, clip them (99% of the images we use need clipping paths or alpha channels) and resize them to a smaller size. As an aside, I'm surprised at the lack of quality of some of the images that are purchased. I'm often viewing and clipping images at 400 - 800% - poor isolations, lack of focus in all areas, over-saturation (which occurs from the added saturation to make the images look great on the websites and then the conversion of rgb to cmyk for print).

I would venture a guess that many big buyers of microstock work in a similar capacity. They needs lots of cheap, throwaway images that they can use once and forget. They want them fast and, again, they want them cheap. Microstock is heaven-sent for these buyers and just a routine part of the process of putting together ad after ad after ad. There is an endless supply of photographers pumping out these kinds of images on all the micro sites so if any site stopped accepting more images going forward it would be no big deal as there are plenty of choices already in the system.

Just wanted to give you some insight into one type of mega microstock buying process. I'm sure there are others.

Lisa, Buyers are not as educated as we contributors give them credit for. They may know that subscription prices at both places are the same but they assume that both sites are providing "different" images. They may not even know about the subscription prices as the business manager purchases the subscription and someone in that position is even more clueless as to how buying stock imagery works. The business manager assumes that since both sites are "cheap", they can give the designers a subscription to both sites and thus access to many more images. They do not know that there are duplicates, or even know, or care, how the images got to the sites in the first place. They do not know if they were submitted by "professionals," or hobbyists.

Designers in this type of business do not know about the inner workings of microstock in general. They read no forums, no sites about how or what microstock is, no industry reports, no photography sites in general. They don't care to know. They just want cheap images fast. They don't care about a site's design, they mainly care if the Search function is easy to use and gives them the results they want. Prices may be the same at both sites but designers don't know that contributors can submit to more than one place. They think in broad terms. They may even buy the same image twice because their immediate need is to find an image fast and use it at that moment. Since it is inexpensive to do that they search the site before searching their previous downloads. One designer may buy the same image as their counterpart on the other side of the building because it is "find it, use it, store it," and the image probably sits in limbo after it's use.

We think that each image we submit is a work of art, we get mad when it sells for a few pennies and we want to track how each image is used. The buyers in my industry think of each image as a commodity. A commodity that has a price that is determined as a function of its marketability. They need throwaway images so why shouldn't they be cheap? To answer your original question (I tend to go on and on) the buyers in my industry think they have access to many images because they have subscriptions at multiple sites, they have no clue about duplicates. If they run across the same image at both places it is of no consequence and they don't take the time to think about why.

I'm one of the Imaging Specialists at the company. I take those chosen images and prepare them for print - convert to cmyk, clip them (99% of the images we use need clipping paths or alpha channels) and resize them to a smaller size.

I always laugh when people on this forum post how insane it is to keep submitting objects on white to the stock agencies and how the micros don't need another piece of fruit isolated or a person isolated. While it is true some subjects are pretty well covered, I also worked for a company where I designed newsletters every month and most of what I purchased was an object with a clipping path or at least over white, because I had to use 2 or more images to convey a message about an article and almost always one image overlapped another, hence the clipping path. Basically what cuppacoffee has described.

Thanks for your insight, cuppacoffee. All valuable information.

Yes indeed, thanks for the insight Cuppa. I've always wondered when one of my ancient and obscure images suddenly sells twice in a few hours whether it has been downloaded accidently by the same person or by different people working in the same office. I guess that's my answer. It is particularly interesting how the designers regard SS as 'their server' and it is simply quicker to find & grab an image from it even if they may already have it stored.