The Microstock Revolution?

An interesting discussion has been started at the MicrostockGroup.com forums.

Some of the main sellers are claiming drops in sales, despite the constant upload of high quality, expensive production images.

Microstock is changing and the offer of new images as immensely increased in the last couple of years. When I first joined Shutterstock, they had about 500.000 images and about 59.000 sellers. Two years gone, and Shutterstock is reaching 3.000.000 (three million) images and have now 86.000 image creators.

My personal portfolio increase in percentage (about 100% a year) is much lower than the increase in total number of images (about 150% a year) and that means my portfolio is less representative and harder to find. Also, there are plenty of offers of images of, to name a few, high-tech objects, business concepts, lifestyle, seasonal concepts, etc. To succeed you have to set yourself apart from the croud, either finding a niche (that won't be a secret for too long) or being innovative and going for high end production.

Also, as the offer increases, quality has equally grown. At a time, microstock was seen as the market for low quality, amateur images. Today, there are big productions involved and quality wise, there's not much to differenciate microstock images from other more expensive markets.

The higher sellers claim drops in sales, while their portfolios have grown in quantity and quality. Agencies have now higher standards and contributors need better equipment and better/more expensive/time consuming productions. Cost of business rose up while earnings have not followed the same evolution curve.

Some voices are now pointing the finger to the subscription model and how unfair it is to image producers. But this is a numbers game and credit sales accross the board are far from the number of sales achieved by the successful subscription models. It's like saying "I don't like it, but can't live without it".

It's possible that agencies will increase prices in order to keep the best sellers to migrate to other venues. Midstock is the buzzword of the moment, where prices are placed somewhere between the actual microstock prices (dollars or cents per image) and tradicional agency prices (hundreds of dollars per image).

If the actual microstock agencies migrate to a midstock system (such as presented by Featurepics, Lucky Oliver and SnapVillage) where prices can be set higher than traditional microstock prices ($1 to $10) there will be a niche for lower priced images and story may repeat itself. Amateurs doing this in their spare time will be able to sell their images for a dollar while more productive, professional ones will have a midground to sell their images while the traditional agencies door doesn't open.

The good thing is authors seem to now understand their strength and ability to, as a whole, impose changes to this market.

What is proposed is:

1 - Opt-out any subscription program where credit sales are available. At the moment, only StockXpert and Snapvillage allow this, while sites like 123rf, Crestock or Dreamstime don't.

The question is we're probably going against the sites that really heard our wishes, like StockXpert whose subscription model was changed and turned optional by submitters request.

2 - Submit lower resolution images to subscription based sites, ie, Shutterstock.

The point here is that Shutterstock interpolates images to higher sizes. Ok, the quality is probably lower than a native high-rez file but will it matter?

3 - Give support to the sites that give better conditions to photographers and illustrators. Featurepics gives a 70% comission. It lacks the support of bigger sellers and doesn't have an advertising budget that competes with the most popular agencies.

Sure exclusive content (or at least newer content, not submitted to other sites before a 3 to 6 month period) would be an improvement, but can word of mouth effectively guarantee the loss made for not submitting to the more popular sites? Maybe in the long run...

4 - Delete portfolios or stop uploading to lower comissioned sites. iStockPhoto pays 20% to a non-exclusive seller.

The question is, how many of us can really afford cutting out a few sites from the top 6 list?

But, questions aside, the truth is the microstock community seems to be joining efforts and asking for what they think is right. That may be a very good thing by itself.

You can read the full thread here: Are things going well in microstock?