AS for .99

Two weeks in. Seems the time for review is taking a while now. I've been a professional photographer since 2000 so a lot of this is going through old hard drives. I've got about 200 images up on 5 sites. I'm going to try shooting original content just for stock from here out and consider it another wing of my business ( I shoot advertising and corporate events ). I know financial prospects aren't high but the plan is when I have free days ( which are endless currently ) I'm going to go out and shoot specifically for stock based on some of the concepts or timely images that are in demand. If in a year or so it can be like $500/ month I'd be happy. Is that unrealistic?

Stock photo pros, if you could tell a newbie one lesson what would it be? And please don't say don't bother lol

Don't bother. Oh wait...    You've entered at a time when the gold rush is long over and the competition is extremely high for pennies. But successful people will always find a way to be successful. 

Regarding $500 per month. It depends on the salability of your work. Highly sellable images may only need a few hundred. If you're like most people you'll need thousands of images to hit $500 p/m.

Quote from: PaulieWalnuts on April 17, 2020, 07:07

You're with the top selling micro sites so not many options beyond that. Maybe Alamy but they've declined to micro prices along with low volume.

Consider selling art prints on Print On Demand sites. Nature is saturated there as well but your work seems more artsy than commercial so you may find opportunity there.

I have been thinking about doing this.  I read somewhere about selling framed prints, but I can't remember the site they said you could do this.  What are some good sites to sell prints on?

There are probably hundreds of POD sites. There's another discussion already going at https://www.microstockgroup.com/product-resale-forum/pod-sites-in-2020/msg547944/?topicseen#new

From what's I've seen people see different results on different PODs. The best thing to do is try several of them and see which ones you do well on.

Quote from: PaulieWalnuts on April 14, 2020, 06:32

There are a ton but I'm not aware of any new ones that stand out. Redbubble, CafePress, Society6, Zazzle are probably most well known. What I've seen is different people get different results so the only way to know which ones work for you is to try them. Here's a list to get started. https://www.ecommerceceo.com/best-print-on-demand-sites/

Yes you need outside marketing on all of them to optimize sales. FAA openly positions itself as a platform for you to sell your work and you need to help bring in buyers.

Also, what will be your strategy for pricing in micro and POD? Micro is cheap and prints are normally way more expensive. If you have photos on micro that people can buy for a couple dollars and then print an 8x10 for a couple dollars at Walmart, why would they pay $30+ for the same thing on a POD? Same question for large prints like 40x60. Why would they spend hundreds of dollars at a POD if they could buy a micro download for a couple dollars and have it printed online cheap?

And yes, buyers do price shop. A lot. I learned this the hard way. A few years ago I separated my images into different subjects for micro and print so there's no overlap. Micro images are cheap and print images are at a much higher price point for both printing and licensing.

Good luck!

Interesting question and answers for 2020.

How do people bring in buyers?

I see the choices for FAA add your Facebook, your Twitter, your Youtube your Pinterest account. So do I have to spam all my friends and family with every new upload or is there some better way to target potential buyers instead of pissing off my friends with spam notices?

What other ways are there to market and bring in buyers? I don't think my own website gets the traffic or would ever interest people.

Build email subscription lists beyond friends and family. Grow social media followers. Optimize SEO. Partner with other complementary companies.

The problem with this is you're marketing to help grow another company instead of your own. And you're indirectly helping competitors. I focus on marketing my own website. When I use a stock site, POD, or other vendor if they dont bring sales without me doing marketing I drop them off the priority list.

There are a ton but I'm not aware of any new ones that stand out. Redbubble, CafePress, Society6, Zazzle are probably most well known. What I've seen is different people get different results so the only way to know which ones work for you is to try them. Here's a list to get started. https://www.ecommerceceo.com/best-print-on-demand-sites/

Yes you need outside marketing on all of them to optimize sales. FAA openly positions itself as a platform for you to sell your work and you need to help bring in buyers.

Also, what will be your strategy for pricing in micro and POD? Micro is cheap and prints are normally way more expensive. If you have photos on micro that people can buy for a couple dollars and then print an 8x10 for a couple dollars at Walmart, why would they pay $30+ for the same thing on a POD? Same question for large prints like 40x60. Why would they spend hundreds of dollars at a POD if they could buy a micro download for a couple dollars and have it printed online cheap?

And yes, buyers do price shop. A lot. I learned this the hard way. A few years ago I separated my images into different subjects for micro and print so there's no overlap. Micro images are cheap and print images are at a much higher price point for both printing and licensing.

Good luck!

Quote from: PaulieWalnuts on December 23, 2019, 00:14

Quote from: Clair Voyant on December 21, 2019, 21:41

Quote from: ML Harris on December 21, 2019, 20:54

This looks to me like another sign that Getty is up against the wall with their debt.

The sheer greed of Getty Images will be the collapse of a once decent company. Once upon a time being a part of the Getty family was a badge of honor. Now I don't see any value in contributing to Getty Images or Istock be it exclusive or non-exclusive. The numbers simply don't add up.

I think it is only a matter of time before contributors stop uploading fresh and new content there. Consider it the first domino, the rest is just chain reaction.

I have seen a person shoot themselves in the foot, but to shoot yourself in both feet is reckless to say the least. And Getty as an entity is doing just that.

Greed may have been a major factor at one time. Now it's probably more competitive desperation. Big licensing fees are drying up. Competition from Adobe growth. Falling prices. Increasing oversupply of images.

Great time to be a buyer. Buyers have been conditioned to expect unlimited everything for peanuts.

Competitive desperation is certainly a factor. But this in part is due to lack of solid management in every way.

You can't keep screwing over the very people that makes your business thrive. As mentioned there is a chain reaction, first your contributors leave as many have throughout the years, then the chatter on social media about how poorly they treat the talent that is their main resource, then eventually this floods into the very people (the creatives) that purchase the content. It is the perfect storm for competitive desperations, you are losing the competitive edge with new content cause nobody supplies quality, and you lose a client base because your offerings are only the dregs of what is available elsewhere. Getty in many ways under estimated both contributors and buyers.

I find it odd that SS and AS actually pay out minimums and increase the royalty based on sales, yet IS is always reducing royalties by an impossible moving target. And you factor in Premium Access where contributors don't get a cut of the 'fee' charged to access our content for SFA.

Not that the Site Results on the left are accurate, but if you have been around long enough there was a time when IS Exclusive killed it and the first 5-7 other totals still did not add up to IS Exclusive. Now there are two agencies almost eclipsing IS. Getty did this to themselves and market conditions just fuelled it.

There are more contributors joining and creating new images than leaving and removing images. And this seems to be by a large margin if I'm remembering the numbers correctly. So what we've taught these sites is, you can treat us as poorly as you like and there are plenty of people who will accept it, and more new contributors will join than leave. We're our own worst enemy. These sites know they can continue removing benefits with little impact other than a few people on a forum creating some noise. It's calculated loss.

Also, buyers don't care. Well, they do, but they don't. They're sympathetic when they hear contributors are increasingly getting squeezed. But when they need that photo for a deadline where their bonus, or even job, is on the line, they buy whatever image they need regardless of what plight the creator has faced. This is the ME economy.

I used to think there was a bottom. A point where they paid us so little the entire model would near collapse and they would be forced to turn things around. I no longer believe that. I now think a disruptive new model will replace the current one long before that bottom is reached. Something, mostly likely Artificial Intelligence, will eventually replace many of us and possibly even many of these stock sites.

I turned in my crown years ago. Was great while it lasted. Downward sales trend plus increased unreachable targets? What's the word I'm looking for? "Unsustainable"

"Money won't make you happy"

"We have some great news"

"Lovely to get the milk, the cream, cheese, yoghurt and the meat without buying the cow"

 

Also the announcement mentioned a steady decline of RM. I wonder how much of that came naturally vs the fact that they effectively hid RM images by making RF images the default in the search. They changed it to where there was no longer a mix of RM and RF. If you wanted RM you'd need to go into the filter and add RM to the search. Seems that this could cause the RM decline or at least accelerate it.

I get RM is clunky. When I've tried using it it's a pain navigating through all of the choices. That doesn't address the fact that there's a big difference in earnings of RM vs RF which mostly now seems to be subscriptions. Maybe there are certain contributors who have unique content that's still earning large amounts from RF. It just seems to be a big gamble to shoot for their content needs lists where production costs can be very high and the return may, or may not, be more than a few cents.

Quote from: PaulieWalnuts on November 06, 2019, 08:34

Of course buyers want cheap, unlimited and simple over expensive, limited and complex.

Maybe they should have come up with a simplified RM model. On my website RM is nearly as simple as RF but is single use.

Of all of the subscription models across movies, music, etc RF photos is the only one I can think of where it's nearly unlimited usage even after your subscription ends.

Plus even higher cost RF seems to be dying due to micro and subscription which shouldnt be a surprise to anyone.

Although I don't doubt it, what is your evidence for higher cost RF dying?

Personal experience and I've also seen other contributors commenting about it.  I used to get large royalties from the several hundred dollar RF sales. Over time these have been replaced with a few cents from their subscription model. I havent had a large sale in a long time.  Why would anyone spend $500 on an image that they can get either through a subscription model or find a similar "good enough" image on a micro site.

I keep wondering where the bottom is to where supply starts dropping and these sites are forced to reverse the downward trend on contributors. Given the record profits of the sites and the massive amount of new contributors who are okay earning peanuts, seems to be a long long way off. Or maybe there is no bottom and stock photography is replaced by something else like AI to where we're no longer needed.

Also wonder what this means for agencies. This Icons8 company is giving images away for now. Once it's improved they will start monetizing it. So these AI companies could replace agencies. Or agencies will adopt AI and make their own images so there could be a mix of images created by AI where the agency keeps 100% and types of photos that only a person could create.

Interesting times.

How much do you need to grow your portfolio annually to maintain your current income with microstock? Just curious if much has changed with running on the hamster wheel and into the growth wall.

I was going to do a poll but there are too many variables. I'll start

Average Portfolio Size: 450 (down from about 2,500 a few years ago)
Years Doing Stock/Micro: 12
Photo/Video/Illustration/Other: Photo
Annual Portfolio Growth Needed: Around 25%

Where do I start... I'd have a warehouse full of cars if I could

Porsche 911 Turbo/GT3, 356 or 550
Mercedes Benz 300SL Gullwing
Plymouth Hemi Cuda or Dodge Challenger Convertible
Dodge Charger 500 Hemi
Dodge Dart Hemi Super Stock
And on and on

If I could only have one, 911

Quote from: ODesigns on February 21, 2019, 14:43

Looking at my remittance email I just got, I noticed some data on the bottom.  At first, I assumed it was related to my overall payments from iStock over the years.  But when I looked closer, I noticed the total was over 5.6 million (I assume dollars) -- and that's not all mine.

Do you think that's how much money they're paying everyone this pay period?  Was this information on previous payment emails and I just never noticed it?

And they are keeping 70-85% of that, wow

If that's total monthly revenue then they're doing $60M a year in sales. If that's the 15%-ish royalty cut then they're doing over $400M a year in sales (?)

Harplee!....most of your replies here are talking about when they left IS some years back and when the going was good, when it was worth breaking exclusivity and go Indie!....not so today. I think most people who joined micro back in 2005-2006 etc can verify that takings have dropped catastrophically during the last 4-5 years.

I am still independent at IS and still earn good money in spite of their lousy commission!

And what is good money? How many images and monthly earnings?

If he/she is making $100 - $200 per month as an IS Exclusive I can't imagine doing worse with SS and FT. Frankly if I was getting $100 per month with 1,500 images I'd either do something different to try and improve earnings or call it quits. That's 6 cents per image per month. That 1,500 images probably took a ton of time and cost to produce and the return is peanuts. If they drop IS and end up earning $50  or even $25 per month does it really matter? I dropped IS Exclusively when I was still doing a couple thousand per month.