My stock journey began with an applicate to supply Getty Images - probably about 20 years ago now. I believe that I received a letter of rejection that mentioned something about not bothering to attempt submission again
I did not give up though and searched for other agencies that may be interested in representing my work. That first agency was Shutterstock. Like others, I went to contribute to other agencies too. Now there are three of us contributing in my business - one more or less full time working on stock video. This work has made a lot of money for the various agencies over the years. Us less so.
I started in microstock because Getty did not give me a chance. So obviously, I shed no tears when my "team" of stock contributors obliterated the industry and we got paid a bit for our efforts.
Unfortunately, some of our agencies have not been able to establish a competitive advantage on anything other than price and availability. Reading the comments and listening to the many YouTube videos, it's pretty obvious that if any of us are going to extract any value from our creative work going forwards, we have to change who we entrust to market our works.
Some agencies are just going to continue to erode price and cut commissions indefinitely and it's obvious to most that it's time to only work with agencies that are committed to providing competitive advantage based on something other than price - like exclusivity and limited availability of core content.
But what are the solutions going forwards for us as contributors?
For photos, I've applied for representation at Stocksy. My thought process was to pull the best-selling top 20% my image portfolio from all agencies and send it exclusively to Stocksy. I have no idea if Stocksy wants my work yet though. All new photo work would go to Stocksy too. Over time I'd then move all reasonable work across to Stocksy and either cull the rest or just sell it from my own site.
One thing this is very compelling for me about Stocksy is that it's a collective. They are not going to be listed on a stock market or bought by some dickhead corporate fund. In other words, as a collective, their primary concern is to keep their buyers and sellers reasonably satisfied. There can be (structurally at least) no other weird and wonderful motives at play.
If Stocksy does not accept my application though, I'm really not sure at this point how to handle the photos.
For video, I'm leaning strongly in favour of going exclusive at Pond5 and removing videos from all other agencies. But I've not been paying attention to the market enough and have a lot of questions like:
- Pond5 exclusivity is for video only, right? If I sent my photos to Stocksy, there would be no conflict between the two agreements?
- Pond5 has an agreement to market though other agencies like Adobe and Vimeo stock. So by pulling my files from Adobe and marketing them all through Pond5, I'd still get the price that I allocate for the videos and I'm not hurting Adobe unnecessarily? Adobe have been a good agency to deal with so far for us and I assume many others too.
- What you lose by not selling at cent commission sites, presumably you can recover somewhat by increasing your clip prices and by obtaining better commissions. I guess that's the thinking, but is that what others have experienced?
- I've spent some time and money building up our own website to represent our work - it seems that Pond5 is comfortable that we continue to market our own work ourselves too?
Anyone else have any questions and comments about this and our options as contributors in the market going forwards?
Perhaps it would be helpful to identify some pathways to best representation for most contributors. We really are pretty much in the same boat with all of this and sharing our options may be good for all.
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