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i've friends here doing exhibitions, fine-art, news assignments, documentaries, there's a whole world outside stock and they get decent money out of it

I don't think selling at exhibitions and art fairs is a viable solution. Maybe at special venues or for very talented artists.
At the fairs I've visited, I see every year new hopefuls in their booths and after trying it once or twice, they count their losses and never return. Even many established artists stopped going to fairs (except some proven moneymakers) or if they do, they use it to promote their workshops.

Saturation is everywhere. There is a need only for so many workshops and there is space on the walls only for so many pictures.

One buck is not so bad for an image, considering that many reported sales are subs at less than 20 cents. First step in addressing the problem is to stop submitting images to agencies who pay such low commissions.

well, the couple ones i know are very specialized in their niche, they only shoot LOCAL things and there's a demand for it from rich buyers and even a few tourists.

they're not getting rich but they're not starving.
technically their style is very "documentary", their gear is canon 1Ds and canon 5Dii, macbook or imac, lightroom, photoshop, and expensive prints in museum quality Giclee, with heavy framing and glass.

in their opinion, they would never make it shooting generic stuff, their niche works because it's focused on local things and local people.

so of course it can't be a biz for everyone and it's dependent on your location.

workshops : yes but honestly i'm of the idea that if you can only pay your bills with workshops you're no more a photographer, you're just a teacher and your field is education.

besides, teaching is not for everyone, i would be a terrible teacher probably, you need a completely different skillset to be a good teacher.

and what's the point anyway ? do you want to be a photographer or do you want to teach about iso/shutter/aperture etc ? i mean if that's the logic why not working in a print shop or a camera store ?

Because the micros have taken up editorial, for better or worse.

if we talk about travel images, micros only provide the most typical and obvious "postcard" images, and yet they're not selling so well either apart for the top locations, anything else would sell near zero i guess, it seems there's just no demand for what you would find on Alamy or other specialist agencies.

i'm not saying this is a bad thing, i'm glad each agency has its own kind of buyers.

Well, I am glad you found your true calling and market niche and best of luck with your gallery sales.

The rest of us will just continue to do stock I guess.

well, so far i just got the foot in the door, but seeing with my eyes the amount of dross they sell for crazy money (say 5000$ for snapshots of kids playing with cats and dogs !) that's the place i want to be in one way or another or at least i'll try having a few sales from time to time, but it looks like a hard nut to crack as the rules of stock and common sense don't apply.

it makes sense only if want to claim to be an "award winning photographer".

you'll not get rich or earn much, but you will get some exposure and therefore some assignments, hopefully from decent publishers.

said that, i just can't see the logic they apply to pick up the winners.
i mean even in serious competitions like Sony awards, Travel Photographer of the year, etc

i would never apply if they ask money, and apart rare cases all the best ones are usually free.

i'm not saying stock is dead and tomorrow we should all leave in droves to grill burgers.

i'm saying in the long term there's no hope for any improvement for us so we must be aware that this industry for us is moribund and hopeless.

should we keep stock as a side business  ? YES !

but, we should focus on other venues too, and quickly.

however we may paint the situation, none of us can compete with the image factories nor can realistically bargain a better deal with agencies.

i've friends here doing exhibitions, fine-art, news assignments, documentaries, there's a whole world outside stock and they get decent money out of it, i see no reason to stick with stock for the years to come, including RM as RM is doomed too in my opinion, it will just take longer than for RF/micro but the fate of RM is being merely used for archival imagery and obscure subjects.

i feel stock is cr-ap from any perspective, it gives no freedom and it even lowers my skills, and only my skills can make the difference between a 1$ image and a 500$ fine-art print.

i want to be a true artist, selling prints and doing exhibitions, earning thousands a pop, i'm done with this 1$ BS market and while the odd 500$ RM sale is welcome i've absolutely no control about what agencies have in store for me tomorrow or after tomorrow.


 

sure, what is the solution then? will we arrange a date and jump off all together? or will we continue to collect and most of these theories will fade away? if microstock/macrostock was doing so poorly we wouldn't be here... but yep its dead!

there's no realistic solutions.

for most of the photographers stock will just become a side business rather than their core business.
for all the others just an expensive hobby.

image factories will survive, eventually cutting costs even further.

i mean it's the same scenario we can see in other industries like ebooks, music, and more.
nobody is making a living with ebooks unless they're either very talented and with the right connections or can produce a new book every month.

publishers make good money with ebooks, but not writers, writers do it as a side hobby, or for vanity, or whatever.
of course there's the odd writer making a million with one single book, but that's the exception to the rule.

music, even worse, but they can get good money with gigs, anybody else play in a band for fun and beer money, others DJ for free at parties or birthdays.

nobody from outside the industry will notice that photographers can no longer make a living with stock alone and
 many RM stockers have already left the industry years ago, do you see anybody missing them ? i don't, and they moved to greener pastured or started a new career elsewhere, that's life.

of course in a perfect world the top tier stockers would start a big collective and force the agencies to pay decent fees but it never happened so far, especially for wire agencies, and neither for art galleries, magazines, weddings .. the only thing i can remember is some unions in big newspapers setting minimum prices for assignments but that's all.

because, the breadwinner is all these industries is the one who finding the buyers and getting paid by the buyers, anybody else comes later and is seen as a cost, we're a cost not a resource, our products are dime a dozen in the actual scenario, any decent amateur can produce a few decent saleable stock images and that's a fact and the root of all evils.

in conclusion, joining an image factory is maybe the best option nowadays.

but we should all think if begging for money to such greedy agencies is what we want to achieve because there's no reason for the situation to improve anytime soon.

selling prints on your own web site doesn't make sense if what you sell is the average stock imagery that could be bought anywhere else, you're simply not adding any value, even Yuri is not getting rich with his own agency despite having 100,000+ images on sale and having invested millions on it.

as for Germany : it was just an example, what about places like Norway or Sweden then ? what can you buy there with 10 euro ? and yet they can buy a high-res professionally edited stock image for as low as 1$ !

how can this be sustainable for us ? soon even grilling burgers at mcdonalds will pay better than shooting/editing/keywording/uploading stock images.

look at the pricing for keywording for instance .. even in India the cheapest rates i see are 0.30-0.50$ per image and that's for bulk deals.

how can agencies have the guts to pay us 0.15$ for subs ? it's just crazy .. completely out of market and reality.
i'll rather sell prints on Flickr, 500px, FAA, RedBubble ...

another BAD sign from Alamy !

why not focusing on their core business --> Editorial ?

so now they have good editorial but lackluster news images, creative collection, and soon bad vectors too.

unfortunately this article doesn't give many details.

it seems it's still legal to shoot images wherever and however you want, what will be punished is the publishing of those images and they will target the photographer, but how can this be possible if the person legally responsible for the publishing is the publisher ?

besides, what if i shoot a photo outside of california and it gets published in california or viceversa ?

In Germany the communists are demanding a minimum wage of 10 euros an hour...

And rightly so, take a look at the cost of living in germany.

They are offering what they say is more efficient revenue (lower costs for SS) and paying contributors less.

Just what we needed !

Another agency trying to be the "Walmart" of stock and paying a pittance back.

Why does IS still list "trending" images by highest rating when no one but inspectors can rate anymore?

http://www.istockphoto.com/participate/contributor-lounge/trends

they should remove the ranking, the forum, the profiles, everything, it doesnt make sense now to be half-agency and half social network.

She did not sign any MR... the image was sold by Getty as editorial...

PS ... i don't understand why Getty accepted that type of image as editorial  ... Submit an identical image on any micro agency as editorial, and the rejection reason will be: Please provide a MR and resubmit as Royalty free.

Maybe the image was sent to a smaller agency that was later acquired by Getty and they messed things up ?

But i'm sure here is the Ad Agency who's to blame, probably a new intern unaware of the difference between RF and RM or they just couldn't care less.