Here's a very lengthy article on the stock photo industry.
https://medium.com/storiusmag/fixing-photography-593e97aa2417

So long that it was hard to read. There were some parts that were quite interesting, a lot that I found quite boring and so I skimmed over those parts. But for sure he makes a good argument about some of the problems that micro stock has evolved into. Namely there is too much crap content that has suppressed prices. Low prices make it difficult for pro photographers to want to contribute, the low prices don't justify their time. Thus just ensuring more crap content that fits the low prices on offer.

I don't think he mentioned this or that I skipped over that part, is that, there is so much amazing content already on micro stock sites, it's very difficult to raise prices for new amazing photos. Because few people want to pay more if they don't need to. In my personal life I often look for the cheapest prices for items I purchase.

What people will pay more for is exclusivity if you are marketing Prada handbags you wouldn't want to use a recognisable stock image that might appear on an advert for 99c carrier bags at Walmart.

Thats not really a "holiday" anymore though. Yes if you are good and work hard you may recoup your costs but its not a case of just reeling off a few shots and watching the money roll in.

Quote from: ShadySue on September 06, 2019, 04:03

Quote from: gnirtS on September 04, 2019, 09:43

That said, the extra effort required to get new techniques, locations, topics may not be worth it if you sell an image for $0.20 or a video for $0.6.

+100
Especially as most things not well covered or oversaturated have limited buyer interest, so pointless in Micro.
I'm sure there are some desirable niches to find, but not many, and I suspect most of them would be very difficult and/or expensive to get pemission to shoot.

I definitely disagree. From my personal experience, there are plenty of niches that are definitely worth exploiting, some of them being huge.

For obvious reasons, I won't say too much, but I'd say that the key is "local", to take some pictures that are country, or even region specific.

From my experience, I only got two failures: France and Ukraine. The French failure is probably due to the fact that there are strong local actors, mainly the huge databases of the local press and the AFP giant, that go, very often, past the simple news material. The Ukrainian failure is probably due to the fact there are proportionally way more contributors than the local market demand.

The only issue with this comes from the keywording. You need to be able to use general keywords and very specific keywords, and it takes research. As a result, it's pretty hard for me to caption more than 10 files per hour. Calculating the revenue, it's however worth it. To summarize, I have noticed that even the "duck in pond" pictures can work if they are keyworded with precision. One of the first pictures I got on microstock back in the time gave me an RPI that is probably 10 times higher than my average, mainly because of the precise keywording. There are, furthermore, plenty of other topics that are usually extremely ordinary, but that are giving a good return on investment as long as you have a clean shot and good keywords.

When the agencies talk about "authenticity", they are kind of right. It takes however a bit more than just doing less processed snapshots or integrating "diversity people" in a picture. In the end, the buyers are getting pretty sensitive to this.

To summarize, to indentify a niche, just explore the local market potentials and the situation of the local competition.

I'd certainly go along with "local" its an area you know better than your competitors and one where you can get images at far less cost. The days of recouping the cost of a holiday in exotic places is long gone I fear. Bus Fare maybe ;-).

1 million dollars paid out per month divided by 170,000,000 photos = 0.00588 cents per photo per month.

Or more simply you need 170 photos to make $1 per month. Or 1700 photos to make $10. Or 17,000 to make $100. That's just an approximate average but on those stats only someone who has more time than sense would upload to Alamy.

Not all contributors are equal. Some people are very succesful on Alamy as they focus on the content that sells there. So someone with sense and ability can make money there but not those who throw random stuff at them.

If I got it right "most" people start by uploading poor quality or common themed items and start to grow or get better / more relevant / picky

If I was asked / had to delete half of current port, it would be the half first with minor exclucions.

Actually.... first 3/4 of it...

let's make it 9/10 to be more accurate...



Jokes aside, whatever I "think" as good or curators tend to rate as better than most of my items is never sold until today.

Quote

Therefore, it is simply the current market. When pirates steal the images of today in two hours and upload them to all agencies in two hours in 100 pirate accounts, it will be a problem greater than the amount of images hosted on a server, patrimony of each agency.

Going offtopic, as long as this is SS thread, it would be interesting, how P5 will react to hosting originals that are stolen and listed in other or even free sites as long as they will have to "match" prices.

Oddly though I am selling more images from 6-7 years back for the first time than new content. tbh my standards have slipped from the days where 40-50% rejections from shutterstock was fairly common.

Quote from: georgep7 on August 31, 2019, 06:51

We can make a list of sites or news agencies that start using free Pixabay generic images.

So what?

Will they ever find a "greek police billingual greek english worded ribbon prohibiting entrance in crime scene"?

Naive example. Yes in time they will eventually find and this. But since then, they will have to buy one from somewhere.

People contributing on pixabay or similar, don't care for the needs of customers or the market. And for sure they don't go after enterprise sales as long as they keep shooting random or artistic.

Judging by the quality of some of images used on so called high end news sites they don't care.

They'd use any image that  remotely fills the bill.  As long as its cheap/free

Yes I think contributors greatly over estimate the quality needs of many of  their customers...often the images are glanced at for fractions of a second. In fact I think crappy looking sloped badly exposed images are quite trendy see the BBC site.

Quote from: OM on August 29, 2019, 07:08

By chance I came across this article on wine from June last year in the Smithsonian magazine:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/california-wine-shows-traces-fukushima-fallout-180969726/

I think that their use of a free photo from Pixabay (pity that the meniscus of the wine is not horizontal!) also tells us that decining sales of traditional microstock may also have to do with 'free'. Before 'free', reputable magazines relied on SS etc as their first port of call for images. Now they first go to 'free' and if they can't find what they want, they then go to the regular MS agencies.

I have no doubt that many other image users also do similar. (No doubt the reason that SS and Adobe see fit to sponsor Pixabay with ads...which suggest that if the client can't find what he wants at Pixabay they should go to SS or Adobe).

Who upload on Pixabay images and videos and gives them away for free?

a lot of people do it seems then wonder why their work turns up nicked on shutterstock.

Anybody know what Enterprise Revenue is?

Watch out though - the easiest way to boost profits in the short term to make shareholders happy would be to edge the algorithm towards 25c sales....
customers then leave due to having to search pages of dross for a good image...
general revenues fall....
commissions get cut to boost profits....
rinse and repeat.

Or am I just in a negative mood today?

Its selling the "premium" images at high prices to big corporates largely through "offset" and similar. Probably people realising that often theres nothing special about many of  these images. The easiest way is actually to pay a flat rate and abandon tiers. I think one of their many mistakes is  believing their own hype about AI being able to to filter out the dross presenting customer with only relevant quality images.

You don't have to do the keywording in Alamy, embedded IPTC data is taken over. I think the supertag method is way superior to AS, where you have to manually move your top 10 keywords to the top of the list. If you have thousands of images, this is a nearly impossible task � and i have yet to find a DAM that doesn't sort keywords in alphabetic order, whether you want it or not.

I upload almost exclusively editorial (newsworthy events) to Alamy but it's been always very slow for me, it's not worth my time. However they are one of the very few fair agencies, portfolio management is convenient, rejection rate is very low (in fact i never had any, as opposed to AS or SS), so i'll just keep uploading. If sales were somewhat better over there, i'd say they are the best agency hands down.

But the super tag thing is time consuming and I think no-one really knows if it makes any difference. I would say total time spent in tagging etc is the longest of any agency....apart from Panther which I stopped uploading too way back as their "system" was tortuous.

Quote from: Clair Voyant on August 26, 2019, 10:17

Quote from: tomn on August 26, 2019, 09:13

ridiculous rejections. I've often had 1 image pass and another that was similar rejected for a stupid nonsensical reason.

rejected for a stupid nonsensical reason like being similar makes sense to me. there should be more of that in microstock. just sayin.

Let me give you an example. I uploaded three images of a colored liquid in a beaker. It was the same image and I only changed the color of the liquid using Photoshop. The images with the green and blue colored liquids were accepted but the one with the red liquid was rejected for "Poor isolation".

Another example: I uploaded a image of a mountain range. It was shot in a National Park and there weren't any people in it. Just mountains and a dramatic stormy sky. It was rejected because:
"There appears to be a release missing for this file. A model release is always required whenever there are identifiable faces present. A property release is required when an file includes private property. Please obtain any necessary releases before re-submitting."

Some National parks do require releases though ;-). Their best ones are nudity wheres theres no one in the picture

Quote from: increasingdifficulty on August 25, 2019, 23:28

Quote from: qunamax on August 25, 2019, 14:42

Or for instance, you could argue that my port or models is of low quality, I certainly tend to do, but seeing my minimap almost completely blank in North America still makes me wonder, is it really me or the fact they do have a field in their database where it says that I'm from a certain country that will take away 30% from US sales.

Well, it has been shown that buyers from the US will first and foremost buy products from the US, if they can. Also, people images from Eastern Europe don't look American, just like Nordic people images don't look Spanish, etc., and Americans are not that likely to need landscape images of non-famous locations around the world.

So, perfectly reasonable and logical explanations why a person with images from a European country (that clearly look European) will not sell as many images to the US.

Yes it's all logical, except 80% of my sales on for instance Istock do come from US.
Not sure how could one differentiate US people from others since the US is a mix of people from all around the world, unless you are talking about strictly multiracial photos, which trully are popular and best represent US.

US people smile a lot and have better teeth than the UK. I think US buyers like a more happy shiny people view of the world than us cynical Europeans ;-).

Quote from: ShadySue on August 24, 2019, 15:19

Quote from: qunamax on August 24, 2019, 14:55

Quote from: cascoly on August 24, 2019, 13:38

Quote from: qunamax on August 24, 2019, 07:48

I don't want to waste much time about it but I think it's rigged simply because it can be rigged and there are reasons why would they rig it, so I wouldn't count on corporate transparency and morals.
However there are things that probably fall out of rig calculations - asset quality and popularity of subjects which rigged or not contribute to randomness of contributor experience. Port size too, while it can be rigged I don't think they would fiddle with it much in a negative way.

Occam's Razor -- the SIMPLEST explanation for all sites yielding lower sales is supply outpacing demand

I'd agree but I'm talking about the way demand comes and goes and how it cycles between weeks of never sold assets and bestsellers.

Just because they are changing algorithms doesn't necessarily mean they're rigged (though on at least one occasion years ago iS did just that)

Well changing algorithms is rigging, thou we were never promised only one kind of algorithm, they can do whatever they want - and what they are doing we may never know. All I'm saying is that it's not a hand of God, they have database programmers.

Rigging implies some kind of deliberate change to penalise certain contributors. Of course they change algorithms to maximise sales. Why wouldn't they? Whose to say the algorithm where you got lots of sales was "fairer" than the one where you don't?