Today SS stats show:
5,502,534 royalty-free stock photos
34,510 new stock photos added this week
134,908 photographers

The trend is lower image acceptance rate at most of the Big 6.
Reviewers want Macro quality and Agencies are paying Micro prices. Micro are still accepting new contributors. SS images count is at 5.5 million, DT image count is at 4.5 million. More startup of small microstock companies.

What is the future for our business? What is the limit? Will we see a limit on contributors?

Please comment, I am interested in your thoughts!   
 

I think we have gone a full circle in a sense. Because RPI is dropping, most serious and talented microstock photographers are moving towards macro. That's because producing great stock images cost a lot and take time, and with low RPI it makes it an impossible equation.

I think soon the newcomers will also realize that microstock isn't a goldmine (anymore).

as tubed said... I think we well see bigger difference in quality (and production value) between micro and macro, and I think it's macrostock imagery that will set the bar higher. There is lots of old junk in macro agencies that isn't quite up to date, but the new stuff will be innovative and great in all ways.

It is definitely getting more difficult to get photos accepted, and the photos that get accepted must compete against more other similar images than ever.

This month I've had a record of 11 rejections at DT, out of 60 uploaded. My first month of double figure rejections ever, and one of the worst ever in terms of acceptance percentage. Compare that to October 2 rejections out of 84 uploads.

I do not expectit to become any easier.

From time to time there is a thread like this one, but nothing really changed. World economy crisis affects almost every business, so I think problems we have are temporary, unless economists find the way out of this sh*t. This thing is repeating every 60-80 years. I am sure microstock agencies won't wait the bankrupt just like that. They will find a solution for their business to stay alive, so they will find a solutions for their contributors. Of course, we can't expect everyone to survive, it's never been like that in nature. Strongest will survive, nothing strange in that. The question is how many of us will survive.  I don't see the problem in millions of images and insane competition of similar images. Agencies can, for example, simply decide they don't need images older than 2 years anymore and get rid of old images. I think agencies don't want to limit the number of contributors, why would some agency do that? They would just limit them selves for new fresh ideas this way and they don't want that for sure. 

I'm looking at the graphs to the right and noticing a lot of green, up-pointing arrows.  Do those graphs not indicate rising sales?  Maybe I am misreading the chart?

I mostly agree with what others have mentioned.

But I think the industry is in a correction period that's going to take a few years to stabilize.

Photographers producing high-cost images are getting to the point where they can no longer afford to produce macro quality stuff at micro prices. So the supply of high-end images at micro prices will begin to dwindle. Or they'll get moved into higher cost premium collections in an attempt for micros to retain higher-end photographers otherwise they'll all head to macro.

Buyers will initially resist paying for "premium micro" but eventually they won't have a choice in a couple of years when the $1-$20 stuff is all similar low production cost isolations and snapshots. The correction will eventually leave a few different price tiers like macro, entry macro, premium micro, and micro.

Getty is already working on this with their Flickr cherrypicking, Istock tiered pricing, and Istock recruiting. Smart move. Unlike some of the other mid/macro companies who rejected micro contributors as evil, Getty was smart enough to know that the best way to get rid of competition is to recruit or buy them.

It's going to be interesting to see how the dust settles over the next few years.

Contrary to what some people have said about "many" photographers going macro, there are drops in the macro market and some of those people are recognizing that they can make money with volume on Microstock.  Swinging door, some leaving some entering. When you see reports of suppliers (photo groups) coming into Microstock because they see the potential for profits, it means, there's nothing wrong around here, except stiffer professional competition.

I don't think "many" people are going to macro. There are a small percentage of contributors that make up a large portion of overall sales that have realized their production costs are outweighing their profits so they're testing the macro waters. They will mostly likely submit high production cost stuff to macro and low production cost stuff to micro. Or they will reduce production costs or just stop doing high cost shoots. Either way, micro is going to start seeing less truly high-end stuff in the $1-$20 range over the next few years.

"Volume" most likely won't help the fact that they will continue to do more high cost shoots and increase image submission but will see diminishing returns. Pricing in micro must go up in order for both agencies and contributors to survive. Or if prices don't go up agencies will start making changes to contributors' agreements that reduce their share of the sales. Psst, Fotolila?

I wonder too if more agencies will be pushing the exclusive envelope as it has been correctly noted that there are literally millions of images out there with many of these images having been submitted to more than one site.  Again, only top sites could pull it off since the sales must remain in order for a contributer to trust a sole MS site with their port.
Some smaller MS sites I see are trying the exclusive route but a contributor will only stick around so long if there's no sales.

It's amazing when you think about it - the amount of new contributors that come on to agencies each day.
I feel it just can't continue like this, and no doubt about it, it does have an effect on each of us that are already there.

I suppose agencies look at it as a way of getting fresh material, from new contributors that will perhaps have a new take on a specific subject.
But as mentioned above, on a few threads, there is plenty of sub standard work getting through which is clogging up the search pages.

If Micro is trimmed down ( number of contributors) and acceptance rates get higher it will be better for us all in the end.
That is not to say that I discourage new contributors or resent them. If their work is good enough, they will deserve to be there and good luck to them!

It's really up to the agencies - they can make it good for themselves and for us!

First off, I've not seen a single agency make an honest attempt to purge their database of poor images.  We all know agencies accepted virtually anything when they first started to grow their image count, and those images still bog down search.  Rather than raising criteria to macro standards, it would seem far more reasonable to purge non-performing, poor images from the existing database.  Addition by subtraction.  It's a win-win, as the agency will have a higher quality portfolio and more sales due to a lack of poor images showing up in search.  The contributors will see be rewarded due to increased portfolio exposure.

I was wondering if you can't reach the same result by simply tweaing the search engine to penalize, say, images older than two years with less than X sales/views (just making an example for the sake of argument). It would achieve the same effect you are describing, give better search results to the buyer and still let the agency boast about numbers. At the end of the day an image in the database that never shows up in broad searches costs only in terms of storage for the agency.

and the improvement of the "search" function for some sites would help too.
lately, i checked on one of my associates work, her new image accepted last week.
guess what? can't find it... using the most obvious keywords.
instead, all i see are pages of single contributors clogging up the first 10 pages
with images that do not even feature the relevant keywords.
then on page 15, or so, aha! her images at last.

it's a mean unjust situation that a site would allow such an abuse of flooding one contributor's images in preference to others who do not have perharps tons of irrelevant images.


would a buyer notice that and get tired of looking?
sure, wouldn't you?  and the one who does no spamming suffers.
where's the justification in all this?

Not a very nice observation. I feel it should be all down to the image and not the artist.
Obviously some reason for it!

Quote from: averil on December 30, 2008, 16:40

I think the future depends a lot on exactly who the buyers are. There are plenty of people who are happy to buy some digital asset at 50 cents a download but not $5, and they're not too fussy about quality. If this market segment is big enough, then when the major agencies raise quality and prices, newcomers will enter at a lower price point and with lower quality images. At the moment most of the sites seem to be trying to woo the big spenders, professional designers and the like, away from the macro sites.

It is natural for us to think about the future of microstock in terms of suppliers, because we are suppliers. However, I think Averil has it right. The future of microstock will  be determined by the market, not the suppliers. Many posters have noted the increase in the number of suppliers, but is that increase greater than or less than the increase in buyers? And, as Averil, wonders, who are those buyers? What do they want and how much will they be willing to pay for it?

Answer those questions and you will know the future of microstock. Unfortunately, the data is not made public.

As a buyer I would say IMHO that Averil and MichaelDB have it exactly right - I believe the low prices are here to stay - for the suppliers it will be all about volume - micro has always been about volume ... is this not the argument that microstock photographers made every time a macro shooter would complain about the low micro prices? How many times have we seen in the past a micro photographer say "I would rather my photo sell 500 times in a year on micro than once every 2 years on macro"? Because of the low costs to entry in this market, there will always be new suppliers ... the bigger question is will there emerge a middle market? Is getty going to lower its macro and raise its micro to create this middle tier? My guess is yes - but it's a risk because micro is not going to disappear and the majority of buyers in micro now will stay there ... companies set yearly budgets and after several years of low image budgeting I find it unlikely that they will be able to argue to their financial directors that they need higher artwork budgets - not at a time when deflation is setting in and belts are tightening .... it's a cycle - today's best micro shooters can join the "new mid-level gettystock" and sell their image at $25 a pop once a month - but their shoes will be rapidly filled (and the micro shooters will rapidly copy their work style) by the next new talented amateur with a good eye who realises that she/he can earn a few bucks on the side and have fun doing it ... that was how micro was born and that is why micro (and micro prices) is here to stay ... this argument about prices being too low has been going on since micro was born ... the macro pros (feeling threatened, and rightfully so) complained that their business was being hurt and that prices were not reflective of the proper value of their work - now many of the micro shooters are arguing the same thing and the shoe is on the other foot - the problem is that the value of work is determined not by the seller but rather by the buyer ... so I would argue that RF macro is largely dying a not so slow death (there will always be a place for rights managed) - is a midlevel market opening up? perhaps - getty and istock are certainly going to try and see .... but micro, of all of them, is now the strongest and will continue to be ... in the longer term, when a commodity/product/service has infinite supply, its price gets driven downward and not upward ... Happy 2009 everyone!!