Microstock Photography

10 Understanding the Microstock Revolution

publishing company.... As an independent stock photographer I wanted to

re-invent the traditional model of stock photography sale.

Bruce Livingstone, Chief Executive Offi cer, iStockphoto

The key features of the microstock sites can be summarized as

follows:

• They are based on various fl avors of the royalty-free sales model—buy once, use
  many times.


• They have low prices, starting at around one dollar for low-resolution images.


• Pretty much everything is done online, from selecting images to payment to instant
  download. Much of the process is automated.


• They build a strong sense of community involving artists and clients that goes beyond
  the seller–agent–client process.


• They are open to, and indeed often initiate, change in response to market demands.
  Their owners or managers are often young entrepreneurs, such as Jon Oringer of
  Shutterstock and Bruce Livingstone of iStockphoto.

The Opposition

If you think microstocks sound great so far, a word of caution—not

everyone is happy with them. They have faced a barrage of criticism

from some with vested interests in the traditional libraries. Criticisms

you may hear include (and I paraphrase but, hopefully, have captured

the essence of the most common complaints):

“You can’t make money from net commissions as low as $0.20 per

download.” The low sale price of microstock images means an inevi-

tably reduced per-image commission for photographers. This is, in

theory (and, in my experience, in practice also), compensated for by

greatly increased sales, so that you can indeed make money from

microstock, despite the low per-image commission. It is more satisfy-

ing, perhaps, to sell one image once for $100 than to sell one image

200 times for a $0.50 average com mission. But do the math; the net

result is the same—$100 net commission.

Feedback I have received from photographers through an online

discussion group I established and run at Yahoo! (see Appendix 3 for

the link) provides anecdotal evidence that their earnings from the

microstocks are comparable with all but the best returns from tradi-

tional libraries. In Chapter 10, we will look in more detail at some

actual case studies.

“The microstocks are destroying the livelihoods of professional

photographers who rely on sales through traditional agencies.”

I’m guessing that horse vendors were none too happy about the

development of the internal combustion engine. The problem is