She didn't even know she could resize a picture, has never used Photoshop or any editing program, and certainly never thought the picture could have any value to anyone else.

Exactly. That would apply to 90%+ of people that I know who are not in the image business.

You can tweak it in curves/levels/saturation obviously but personally I don't usually bother shooting for stock until conditions are virtually perfect. It's likely to be a waste of time as you will be competing for sales against better images.

Not really, there was a cost of doing business and the picture existed for the client to see ahead of time exactly what they were buying.

Wow __ does your 'cost of doing business' require you to sell a 'cloud & sky' image for $10k then? Amazing. I can knock them out all day for a dollar or two provided a few people buy it.

I see there a sky image on IS that has sold over 4000x in just over one year though, probably making it's author a tidy $8K or so and still going strong, so maybe not much really has changed since the good old days. If your stuff is good enough then you will still earn it __ even on microstock.

A few random thoughts here. How many of you are willing to spend $2500 to $5000 for a shoot and place it on the micros? $2500 buys a bare bones shoot for 6 hours with a half dozen models. Nothing fancy. The problem with the market is nothing was ever done to price images differently based on production costs. Perhaps micro photographers who are at the top end of the tiers in the various agencies can do this but  a lower level photographers would find it hard to re-coupe his investment. These images are the bread and butter of most agencies and I don't know if the market will stop demanding them.

$5k is nothing fancy?! I'd consider spending that sort of money without a commission very 'fancy' indeed. I could fly to the other side of the world and have 6 weeks travelling and photographing in relative comfort for that. I'd still expect a payback of 1-2 years too which is reasonable for most business propositions.

Of course every business invests in it's future and takes a risk in capital outlay but that to me is the extreme end of the scale and obviously not practical for the microstock model. It is also unnecessary to spend anything like that to produce 99% of the images that the market needs.

As Lise has said microstock is all about the photographer using their guile and what they have available to produce images that the market wants inexpensively. Nothing wrong with that __ most businesses I know are ruthlessly efficient in their spending and the value they add to their product. Clearly that wasn't happening historically in the macro model which is why it has been left so high & dry. Did they reduce prices when digital lowered the costs of production and the internet lowered the cost of distribution? No, because there wasn't a genuinely competitive market. Well there is now and things will never be the same again.

I'd agree that it would be good to have the ability to set prices according to production costs though __ then the market would tell us how much they were prepared to spend and in what volume.

When you check various portfolios at Shutterstock, you quickly realize that 8 out of 10 almost look identical. Their best sellers could be from each others portfolio.

Some really creative contributors come up with new unique ideas but seriously. There are those waves of concepts. A year ago it was the floral design vectors or all the grunge vectors. Now you have the vectors with 3 colored arrows pointing up or 4 colored backgrounds with silhouettes of people dancing in them.

Out of those 90.000 images per week there are too many newbies (with inferior stock quality - not useless but not a real competition either) and lots of people copying each other.

So I think it doesn't matter if SS has 5M. or 7M. images - the niches will still be small or not filled at all. In my opinion SS is accepting too much stuff as are other agencies. Quality has been going up but in many areas it is still sub-par. Still you see badly isolated shots with dirty gray edges etc. That stuff shouldn't be online. SS is following a different strategy rather than providing solely high quality images...

And when you look at the Trads you will see more contributors with outstanding content than bad ones. Just because millions of freelance graphics designers and ad agencies keep buying from the Micros doesn't mean that thousands of big corporations don't need exclusive or RM material for their campaigns. RM is going to stay in one way or another.

I dare to mention the example editorial. Let's say you covered a local event and upload it as editorial to SS, DT and BigStock. What are you getting out of this? 10 sales? 20? If you have 1 sale at Alamy you start with more money than all sales at the micros altogether...

There is so much to consider when uploading to RM agencies. For one you want to make big $$$ by delivering fantastic content but on the other hand you want to cover niches/editorial that simply won't cut the cheese on the Micros.

You must be looking at very different searches to me. Try a search on 'food isolated' at both SS and Alamy. On Alamy you get 22K results, on SS you get nearly 10x more. The SS images are, at least to my eye, generally of a significantly higher standard in variation, composition, vibrancy and the quality of the isolation __ there's no comparison. You can have a months subscription (750 images) at SS for about the same cost of a single license at Alamy too (as well as 10x the choice).

I notice that on Alamy my default search results are hugely dominated by one photographer. Ironically it is the same guy who was kicked off SS about 18 months ago for trying to game the system by uploading the same images up to 6x each. Silly boy __ that'll have cost him. Again try a search on 'sardines isolated' on both sites to see his stuff and then what a transparent meritocracy produces.

At least on SS with the default search order you are getting a fairly reliable indicator of what the buyers are choosing __ if there's a lot of similar type images then it's because that's what they're buying. I've no idea what I'm getting on Alamy but what they're showing me is not very impressive.

About the RM agencies I don't know yet what will happen in the future but for the time being I see is that my revenue from RM is falling while those from RF is ramping up.

Of course it is because that's what's happening in the overall market. I've just done an example price check for the use of one image from each of your portfolios for a billboard campaign. I was quoted about $2500 for the highly-restrictive, once-only, answer-10-questions usage of the RM image __ and about $15 for the no-questions, use-as-many-times-as-I-like RF image. That's 166x more expensive for the highly-restricted option and such a huge differential makes little sense to me (both images were taken in China btw).

As it happens there's a bill board campaign in my local area (one them just up the road from my house) which features one of my own images. The image is one from a farm animal series I took a couple of years ago. So far the series have sold about 200x on IS and I've also had 4 EL's at SS from one of the images. I would estimate that so far the series has earned me about $600 and should go on to earn much more. I was just driving past a field when I saw the potential and I stopped for maybe 15 minutes to take a few shots __ of course I wish I'd taken more now. I actually remember thinking as I clicked the shutter "That's a $100's ... that's another $100's ...". Easy and not particularly unusual either. I feel quite well rewarded for my efforts. Why do I need to demand $100's for each useage?

I cannot find the motivation to 'explore' the macro market as I just don't think it has a long-term future. Sure, they'll always be niche agencies for highly-specialised subjects, but not for the mass-market stuff that probably accounts for 99% of sales. I've spoken to a few of my fellow microstockers who have put time and effort into building an RM portfolio and without exception they report that earnings per image are well below what they get from their micro portfolio.

Micro is still relatively new __ even us 'old-hands' have only been doing it 4-5 years and it's only recently that the micro libraries have grown to the size from which to seriously compete with macro. It's only just begun. Give it another 5 or 6 years (maximum) and the 'macro market' will simply not exist as we know it now.

SS currently has a library of 7M images and, at their current rate of growth of 90K new images per week (which has actually been steadily accelerating), will have over 30M by 2015. What subjects/needs won't be covered within that?

When major macro players like Iofoto and many others start feeding the micros with thousands of images then you know that the writing is on the wall. It is surely only a question of 'when', not 'if', that at least one significant macro agency like Alamy will be forced to drastically revise their pricing structure to compete head-on with the micros. When that happens the rest will collapse like a pack of cards. The thousands of smaller agencies, unless they are highly-specialised in something like botanical images or insects, will just disappear.

They'll be very few photographers selling individual licenses for hundreds or thousands of $'s in 5 years time. The smart ones will recognise the direction the wind is blowing and adapt their business model accordingly.

The fact is, in the art world it didn't really matter how artistic the work was, what mattered in terms of success was being in a gallery . . . context is everything. For this new �everyone is invited into the gallery� democratic world, it seems the market says a good, high quality image is worth about one buck and I don't know how you would remove the people from the gallery unless you yell �fire�.

Hmm __ reminds me a bit of Jack Vettriano. In terms of sales of postcards, posters and paintings he's the art world's equivalent of Yuri Arcurs but was never really accepted or applauded by 'the arts establishment'. He makes a lot of money from churning out popularist stuff that the public wants to buy though.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts/3641007.stm

We are talking UK ryanair flights here - booked as far in advance as possible. No business surcharges for early or late, sometime, yes I stay overnight, usually on an airport lounge floor.

Ah __ that's more like it! You made it sound like a breeze in your previous post but of course the reality is many long and uncomfortable hours.

Very good post overall although I'm not sure I agree with the concept of using your camera like a machine gun __ I've seen quite a few people wasting a lot of their own and others' time attempting this (it doesn't really work). You might get away with that on Alamy but it won't work on micro's as it's just too competitive. Quality trumps quantity every time.

I'm a little sceptical that the background colour of food shots is that important __ especially pink. After all a half-decent designer should be able to modify the background to any colour they choose.

Food is basically thousands of niche subjects, some of which are vastly more popular with buyers than others. Beef is generally the most popular meat for example and with Chinese food then shrimp dishes almost always outsell any other kind of meat or fish __ basically because they both look good and, being more expensive, are somewhat 'aspirational'. As they say 'stock imagery is about portraying the world as we'd like it to be not how it actually is'.

I doubt many buyers would search for something as unspecific as 'food' anyway. They'll be after a specific type of food like 'lasagna' or 'bacon sandwich'. That cuts choice down a lot. I'm sure even a marginally better image of a lasagna on almost any background will always outsell a worse portrayal on a pink background. Much better concentrating on getting the food and the photography right than thinking it's all about pink backgrounds.

Of course microstock vastly outsells the trad agencies in volume anyway which therefore provides much better data on what is popular. For example Lise on her own sells roughly the same amount of images per month on IS as the entire Alamy library does. The results of any popular search term at IS, sorted by best match, will tell you anything you want to know about what styles/colours/etc are currently popular with buyers.

The issue was not subscriptions but lock-in period. In general, when a site changes conditions unilaterally, you can get out at once by not agreeing to the changes.

Exactly. I'm quite sure if you had objected to subscriptions that strongly then DT would have waived the lock-in.

However, the problem I have with sites/programs like istockcharts is that I don't have any control over whether or not my information in made available on a site or in a program I know nothing about. 

Yes you do __ could have just emailed them and asked to be made anonymous (like all admins, inspectors and many others too).

In the ideal world I'd like to have access to all the info and nobody else would. But of course it doesn't work like that and I think if you access the istockcharts for your own purposes (and who doesn't if they're honest) then you have a duty to share your own info too.

Personally, although I didn't much like the 6 month hold in the beginning, I have come to appreciate it.  There were times that I seriously considered istock exclusivity and having that 6 months forced me to bide my time and make a thoughtful, considered decision rather than an impulsive one.   

And without fail every time I was close to choosing istock exclusivity, IS always managed to do something within that time to make me glad I was independent.  If I haven't said so before, I owe DT a big Thank You because their 6 month hold has saved me from making a hasty decision more than once  

Exactly the same here. I could have made a very expensive mistake if it hadn't been for the 6-month lock-in. I did get as far as not uploading to DT for 4 months once in preparation for exclusivity __ but then I came to my senses!

For me  it is not going to be big loss but it can be a gain:
1. I already sell images thru StockXpert/Photos.com
2. I got only 130 images on IS
3. I do not sell a lot on IS

It cannot be much worse than that :-)

If your images are already there via StockXpert then ... a) what's the point  ... and b) you do realise you get (even) lower commissions via IS ??