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« on: May 24, 2015, 06:52 »
Over the last 12 months, ever since they started the subs thing in May of 2014, I have watched my average dollar per download drop to about 20% of what it was 18 months ago as subs sales have increasingly cannibalized my credit and cash sales into being next to nothing. And since 2011, I have watched my total monthly income drop to about 15% of what it was at its peak.
Of course my total monthly downloads have gone up a bit again in the last year, but this just means that people are getting use of my images for a much lower cost. Does this make me happy? No, of course not. It devalues my work and means people are paying me less for my creative efforts now. As an artist that never feels good. But that's not really the most important issue here.
On a business level I can no longer afford to create quality imagery for stock photo purposes. The return per image just isn't there anymore based on the investment cost (money and time) of creating new content.
For the old imagery I put online 2-3 years ago, it has already paid for itself, so if I am now getting less per image but more downloads from it then it is still not OK, but I'm not actually losing money on those images, just making a lot less from them.
But if I am to create new imagery, and will get much less per image for the new stuff, and have my sales spread over a greater number of my images to make those sales, then the cost of creating new imagery just can't pay for itself anymore on a per image or even a per shoot basis.
So what do I do? I may snap something on the street, or here or there and upload it to iStock when I have a bit of extra time. Or I may not upload anything at all. But when I do, the images I am uploading are stuff that requires almost no effort to shoot, thing's that cost me nothing to create, and things that I am not going to spend any time post processing or compositing like I did before. I also may upload some leftovers I have from a commercial shoot, basically the stuff nobody really needs or wants that wouldn't be used for anything else.
The result of this is iStock, and many of the other stock sites that have also raced to the bottom (to offer photo buyers who were still willing to pay a lot more for quality pictures until this race to offer the lowest prices started) are now being flooded with mainly shooter's garbage snaps again.
We have now gone full circle by going back to the days when photographers used to just give their leftover images to photo banks to try and sell for them while the togs mainly just concentrated on commercial assignments. So we are back to square one where nobody is really shooting quality stuff for stock anymore, nor have we really progressed in the last 10 years in terms of a more sustainable stock photo business model.
The one good thing is I can put up any leftover stuff I do have now without having to worry about painstaking inspection standards now that iStock opened the flood gates. So I am welcome to dump my garbage into my online portfolio as much as I want in the off-chance some subs buyer is willing to download it for a few dimes and quarters. Truth is I'm hardly doing myself a favor with that approach though (because the income from it is so nominal), nor am I really helping buyers either with my junky file uploads, but that's all that's left to do. So I'm just offering buyers low quality photos for low prices when what most of them really want is high quality stuff and would still be willing to pay more for it.
But are the buyers really unhappy knowing that there isn't much new high quality stock being created now? Probably they can't really tell the difference just yet because there is still so much good quality older stuff online that they can choose from at these lower prices. So they are having a field day for now and are the true winners in all of this. Neither the artists or the photo resellers are benefiting at all from this when they should be in some way. And for the photo buyers themselves, this just means more money left over to keep in their pockets with prices now being about 20% or less of what they were before. Nice one iStock!
Though when trends and styles start changing, as they do quite often, graphic artists and photo buyer's will start finding themselves having difficulty finding current, high quality, and relevant stock content they need in the future. Just like it was back in the day where much of the time you couldn't find relevant stock photos in photo banks and had to hire a professional to shoot what you really needed.
Also, it will reach a point where the quality stuff that is online for these cheap prices will have been seen and used so much already by the marketplace that image buyers may not want to keep using the same old stuff that everyone else has used already over and over again, regardless of its quality.
Maybe at that point some agency will emerge from the rubble charging prices again that makes it worthwhile for photographers to invest time and money to create quality content for stock once more and then buyers will return to paying the prices they were willing to pay before iStock went head to head with Shutterstock to try and win this game of who can sell the most downloads at any cost.
The irony in all this is that Getty will probably bankrupt themselves by racing to the bottom which will just prove to everyone that it was probably one of the worst business decisions ever made by a competing stock agency to try and copy Shuterstock's business model and cheapen the value of everyone's work even further to the point of capitulation.
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