Microstock Insider - Site reviews, Photographer guides, Industry Updates - New |
- Introducing PicWorkflow
- November 2010 Microstock News
- Changes to iStockphoto Royalty Structure
- Looking Back, Looking Forward
- Comparison of Popular Search Keywords
- Measuring My Self Promotion Results
- Suggest a topic
| Posted: 02 Dec 2010 07:59 PM PST No sooner had I posted last months news update than I opened my inbox and found a press release for picworkflow, I'm not exactly sure what I was expecting picworkflow to be, but I have to say it was with some delight I found it was a direct replacement to isyndica.
Since isyndica closed my microstock uploads have been somewhat on the backbuner, although prostockmaster is free it does not support all the sites I want to upload to, and my previous FTP tool took a dislike to windows7, only $50 for the latest version, but neither get around the fact that my upload speeds are limited to about 300kbps (reasonable ADSL1 speed) not too slow but it takes at least 30 minutes to upload a handful of good sized images to 15 sites. I'm looking for speed NOT work-arounds. With my current upload process gone I've been using the opportunity (yes it's been a while without uploads!) trying out a few things including trialing the keywording service at dreamstime. I had planed to cobble together a shell script to run on my own server and ftp to each site in turn from there. Not any more! So far I've only conducted a little testing, setup 10 sites and uploaded 7 images to each with picworkflow, things look good. I'll modify the review as needed as get more photos uploaded and see how it works in the long term.
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| Posted: 29 Nov 2010 10:18 PM PST  Dreamstime celebrated their 10 millionth image with a day long 20% discount sale for buyers and 100% commission to contributors. This brings a total of 3 microstock agencies with more than 10 million images in their own collection (so pixmac excluded). 123rf looks like it will be next in line. In tandem with last months site updates and introduction of $1 images, Crestock relaunched themselves as "Good. Fast. Cheap" at the start of the month. Their previous price levels and site style placed them more towards the premium end of microstock. PicScout launched a new version of their browser plug-in to help buyers find images. The new plug-in creates a sidebar which allows buyers to easily select which images on a page are available for sale. Veer limited uploads to 50 images per week. Shutterstock launched a new version off their contributors home page which features a map of recent sales and then real time image sales by geographic location, and new graphs plotting overall earnings and earnings from new uploads. Just when I though that the yaymicro marketing department had fallen asleep they launched a new affiliate program, it looks very well thought out and is significantly better than their previous offering of 10 euro cents per download for togs and buyers for 5 years. The new offering is 20% for lifetime of buyers plus 5% second tier earnings from that buyers referrals. You do need to read some of the documentation to get the most, there are several handy features to get referral codes for any page, and finally! thank you yay! for being the first microstock to track the url of the referral and display it in my account. Along with 20% discounts for image buyers they also launched a promotion for bloggers (anyone with a website) to add a banner for 1 year and win.... yes you guessed it, prize of the moment, another ipad. Advertise Here | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Changes to iStockphoto Royalty Structure Posted: 08 Sep 2010 10:54 PM PDT  istockphoto have announced a restructuring of their royalties to take effect in January next year. There is quite a lot to digest, if you have not already read this post on their site then get a drink and take it all in. In trying to think of something positive and objective to write, I'm struggling: It is very interesting that it looks like istock is no longer just a microstock site. I know this has become a cliche, but microstock has become, more than ever, 'mainstream'. Just like when Veer (re)launched their marketplace, from 2011 it looks like istock will be a significant seller of macrostock and microstock side by side. Prices are not confirmed, nor are exact details of the images but they will be selling the “agency collection” (Getty) along with a collection of crowd sourced images from their contributors (the current istockphoto collection). I do hope for the sake of budget conscious buyers that a ‘sort by price’ feature is added, we can never go back to the days of a good sized image for $1, but increasingly over the years I’ve found buying from istock (noted thats only a handful of images per year) has become more and more tedious. My dollar now brings me a just about big enough web-res image after fishing through pages of results sprinkled like a minefield with images that cost $20 for XSmall. There are not many eCommerce sites that don’t allow you to sort by price, or filter out the highest priced collections if they are not in your price range.
15!I can’t think of anything pleasing to write about non-exclusives royalties dropping to an all time low of 15-20%. These sound like small percentage changes but represent 15% decrease in your income. Exclusives fare better when it comes to royalties but those who have been contributing for many years, it looks to me, will loose out in terms of not reaching a royalty rate that matches their currently canister level rate.
Dangled Carrots are now Moving GoalpostsCanisters have been a feature of istock for many years. There, presumably like every other website that offers such a tally of sales (or other metric) to motivate contributors into uploading more images. More sales will eventually bring you a higher royalty for those sales. This worked well for istock because most users upload images and don’t get past the first or second canister and istock can increase the number of sales needed to reach a canister level at any time. From 2011 Canisters no longer figure in your royalty level, your royalties will be based on the value of the images you sold in the previous year. From one point of view the changes now more fairly factor in value of the sales so you get closer to your next royally level if you sell lots of expensive images. But the motivation for hobbyists (even the serious ones) has now all gone, those that have been slowly working their way towards that next canister are left dead in the water at 15% if they don’t sell 2000 credits worth of images a year.
Community Voice“Not happy Jan” seems to be what a lot of people think. Call me cynical or just pragmatic, but there is nothing I can do about it. It’s very hard to be sure if this will be a decrease in earnings for me as a non-exclusive, certainly it’s a decrease in royalty per sale. The commission structure was not exactly straight forward before, adding extra terms and complication to it has not helped – perhaps only to obfuscate what has happened. Even if contributors leave in droves and istock cannibalize themselves, Getty will still be making a pretty penny while they do so. It’s not like there isn’t a track record of cannibalizing agencies. Perhaps istock will one day be included in the long list of agencies who’s home pages now point to getty.com or just resell their images. I've written before that in a few years I don’t think microstock will be ‘microstock’ and that we live in a short/medium term phase were stock images come from two separate streams, eventually that will only be one stream - perhaps with multiple facets. Opinions on other microstock blogs: An explanation of Redeemed Credits: mystockphoto.org/istockphoto-contributor-royalties-major-changes Entertaining post from Matt: niltomil.com/microstock-world/istock-royalty-structure Funny if you know the industry well: stockphototalk.com/phototalk/2010/09/why-.html People I've never seen comment came out of the woodwork: microstockgroup.com/istockphoto-com/istock-changing-royalty-structure And finally, from the same MSG thread… a little smile to end with.
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| Posted: 06 Jan 2010 05:00 AM PST Less than a week in yet that hang-over seems so long ago! I submitted 170 images last year, that's nothing like the number I was planning 12 months ago, that's despite upload being easier than ever. Thinking back 12 months and things felt very different, as I'm sure they will in 12 months time. Good news being that my earnings are up. <!--break--> Looking Back - A 2009 Retrospective
February saw a trip to San Jose for UGCX where I had the opportunity to meet with fellow photographers, bloggers and big wigs from the stock photo world - in fact much 'bigger wings' that I imagined meeting. The whole thing gave me a much broader perspective on the industry, if you think microstock seems to be constantly changing and morphing you "ain't seen nothin". That said I can't quite get away from thinking about the "Random organizational changes" Scott Adams wrote about in as "management time fillers" in the Dilbert principle book. But what do I know!? Veer arrived and caused a stir, with their, at the time "incredible shock! horror!" news that they would be mixing full price and micro on one website. 10 months later It just seems like a natural thing to provide clients with a range of images from various sources, some budget and some premium. Shutterstock bought out bigstockphoto allowing them to take a part of the pay-as-you-go market while also concentrating on their core subscription business. Probably the biggest change of the year from the contributors point of view was the launch of isyndica - that day uploading got a lot easier. In making the whole process easier for everyone we all face an even more difficult job getting our images accepted. While your workflow is still critical for success the focus of microstock is moving even more towards great photos (which it should) and not being an issue of overcoming technical problems like post processing and uploading. Lookstat also launched their paid services for processing keywording and submitting images, aimed at stock imaging professionals it caters for photographers who "only take photos" leaving them to do what they do best, in some respects combining lookstat and the agencies mirrors the process of traditional stock. 12 months ago the big agencies had about 5 million images each - right now they are hurtling towards 8 million, and shutterstock leading with 9,480,272 as I write this. 10 million is coming very soon with well over 1/4 million new images a month.
An old friend brings comfort in times of changeTowards the end of the last year we revisited the "microstock in evil" thread in the blogosphere (how 'last decade' does blogosphere sound!), this time extended into to the whole of stock photography being evil, some quite amusing posts were tabled: stock photography is a gold rush, ("The only people who profit are those selling the tools", kind of ironic considering the website that's published on) If microstock is a gold rush then it's been rushing quite nicely for at least 5 years. we're a bunch of monkeys in a post riddled with factual error and assumptions based on thin evidence. Tyler at MSG made rather a nice rebuttal to that "story". ...oh and that bloody jar of coins, again the irony is not lost on me when considering the subject of the Time magazine cover story and the expectation that someone deserves 3k for such a photo. and after the smoke has cleared your welcome to slit your wrists and end it all because we're all just wasting our time. (Sadly there is an air of truth to thoughts of a bohemian, in that while microstock quality goes up and up, the photos in print media which were always exceptional/thought provoking/cleverly chosen are now starting to look like something just pasted in to fill the space.) and finally my favourite: a parallel between microstock and China's environmental policy. I'm not blinkered to these stories, I do think some big change is happend and more on it's way for microstock and stock photography in general, these days change is ALWAYS on it's way. Microstock is still seen by some as the cuckoo in the nest throwing out the traditional business, but melodramatic as it might sound I think it's more the meteorite and dinosaurs. I think these stories and arguments will go on forever: we work in an industry that at one end has amateurs who consider the cost of shooting an image to be zero, and at the other end professionals who are acutely aware "that time is money". Just because digital photos don't have physical processing costs does not mean that they are free! Microstock needs both, without the amateurs it will grow up into a tunnel-minded industry obsessed with churning out clone images just like the ones that already sell. No offence intended to those out there who create new and creative material each time they shoot.
Word(s) of the Year
Looking Forward, Plans and the FutureLooking forward to 2010 leads me to wonder can amateurs still sell their work at microstock? Of course I already know the answer to that: yes, absolutely, it's the amateurs that defined microstock, they are a vital part. Look at Getty trawling flickr to get 'natural style stock'... Sometimes looking at acceptance rates and comments from noobs I'm not quite so sure it's that easy. I think making assumptions based on 'handed down' knowledge were the biggest things that I have learnt in 2009, in that they are not always correct. Lots of nice copyspace and the experience of thumbnail readability are one where I think microstock breaks a lot of expectations - we all 'know' that designers love copyspace, but they don't seem to buy it. I repeatedly hear that designers also hate contrasty images and over saturated colours, yet many of the microstock sellers seem to be just that (fine for web but not that good for print perhaps). There are no hard and fast rules here but I just get the feeling that a lot of things that I have learnt from other people and seen first-hand in the past 10 years are not quite as set in stone as I thought they were. 'Free' and Creative Commons, more important than ever. I could sit here and make all sorts of new year resolutions about uploading more this year; one thing that is for sure is that I should probably be getting that next batch ready instead of typing this. So stop reading and go start taking photos and selling them; finally, if a little belated, all the best for 2010 from microstockinsider. Advertise Here | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Comparison of Popular Search Keywords Posted: 30 Nov 2009 11:50 PM PST A couple of days ago there was a post on the lookstat blog titled top search keywords for energy, it compared search terms in Google in an attempt to estimate popularity of energy images on microstock sites. Earlier this year I did something similar in a post about seasonal stock images, and at the time I made the point that I wasn't exactly sure how well Google search terms related to searches on microstock sites. So that set me thinking... (yes, be very afraid) Just exactly how much of a match is google trends/adwords data to what people are searching for at microstock sites? Clearly there will be some relationship, but I'd also guess that there are lots of popular terms that will not have a proportionate number of microstock searches. It's difficult to know how similar the two are. Is it reasonable to assume that popular keywords in Google are more likely to lead to more microstock sales as those keywords make popular subjects hence there will be related businesses in need of such images? As they say "assume makes an ass out of u and me". <!--break--> Say for example we see that holiday flights is a popular subject in google, we also see that exchange rates is equally popular, for me it's a stretch to say that images representing exchange rates will sell in the same proportions as ones depicting holiday flights, surely there are too many variables?
Another Data SetI have access to the keywords that people used while browsing a free stock photo site (similar stockxchange but nothing like as big). Of about 1 million searches in 2008 and late 2007 there were some 160,000 unique key phrases searched. The vast majority of them only got one search (just 48k with 2 searches or more). This is just one of the places in microstock we see the 'long tail / exponential decay graph', see my post how long images continue to sell and more recently microstock dairies revisited the longtail. A plot of the top 100 is as follows: full table of the data is below, only every 4th keyword would fit on the graph:
The keyphrases were sorted as is, so typos, stemming and things like entering the search "cat." or "cats" have not been grouped along with all the other "cat" searches. Likewise the total for "people" does not include a total of times users searched for terms with people in them like "young people" these are listed separately.
ComparisonArmed with this data (in the slowest pivot table known to man) I decided to do a bit of analysis to see how these matched the results in the lookstat post:
Left: Google search analysis from the lookstat post and Right: results from the free stock photo site data set. Looks like they match quite well! Anything below 10 could perhaps be considered error and could easily be skewed by some other factor. I was convinced I was going to be able to prove that energy jobs was popular in Google but not a popular stock search, it seems that way but sadly I don't think I have a large enough data set to be certain (?). What's quite interesting is that only 45 out of a million searches were made for our 'top' energy keywords (there were also 6 similar with one search each - "solar energy farm", "solar energy panel" etc) plus many more for single keywords of solar, energy and their related synonyms).
The Top 100For extra comparison, the keywords in my data set look a lot like those top 100 keywords searched on Shutterstock, although I have a definite English language bias, I also have not removed from the top 100 several keywords like 'nude' and 'sex' that are probably not image buyers. Quite a lot more variability in the ordering and plenty of the keywords Shutterstock have in their top 100 only made it into my top 200.
Note: "blank" searches are probably either robots, perhaps mistaken users, or users just seeing what an empty search does. Interesting if you run a web site with a photo search then a blank search should most likely not allow you to search, or perhaps return a message with nothing found but ALSO a selection of random or popular images. Ranked 95 to 99 "chocolate, beer, tv and space cake", sounds like a good night in, lol.
Unlucky for someHeres a few of the 406 terms that had 13 searches each: baby jesus, voucher, pylon, weed, quebec, ladders, computer chip, emo girl, brussel sprouts, learner driver, woman on phone, lord of the rings, lotto, turf, fashion clothes, sand clock, ghandi, abba, herron, synergy, tofu, hunk, paper plane, miami beach, nylon, andy warhol Quite an eclectic little bunch and I think this is the first time synergy, tofu and andy warhol have been used in the same sentence. Quite a few of the searches are not what you would call 'traditional stock subjects'.
ConclusionIt seems reasonable that a comparison of relative terms in google trends/adwords will match the relationships between searches on a stock photo site, but I still think that there are a lot of keyphrases for which that is also not the case. I plan to analyse the data some more to see if I can pick out a few obvious "search engine popular" keywords that don't match image searches. it would be really great if google would let us search their "image search" volume alone. I did previously look at using the google data by combining keywords of interest with the keyword "photos", "images" or "pictures", it works for very popular single word searches but not for most key phrases. We have thus far ignored which images actually sell! see picniche for more about that. I should be able to set-up something were you can query this data and my more recent 2009 dataset, if anyone is interested?
Related Links Best selling images and top search terms at pixmac
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| Measuring My Self Promotion Results Posted: 29 Sep 2009 12:37 AM PDT Coinciding with iSyndica's announcement of the official launch of their 'promotion service' I thought it was time to share a few preliminary results of my investigation into promotion with 'free stock photos'. Even before I wrote the article microstock photos for free I've had been redistributing some of my images for free on various websites with somewhat inconclusive results. The following table shows the sites I have uploaded images to, the number of images, image views recorded by those sites and the number of times someone clicked a link to my website. Measurements for the first 4 weeks of September 2009.
Caveats and Notes: Results of click throughs were collected using web server stats, and in some cases where zero results were seen I confirmed this against google analytics. The same images were not added to each site (making this a less than fair comparison), some of the sites contained stock images, some contain travel photography and some more creative/abstract work or my personal images. On almost all of these websites the images are provided in return for a link attribution, traffic generated from these links is difficult to attribute to just one source, but this link-back forms the primary rational for 'giving the images away'; this very important factor is not included in the table. The results to not show the 'branding impact' generated, even if viewers did not click they probably saw my name or pseudonym, perhaps even the url of my website. Like other forms of advertising these 'sightings' can help you get noticed in ways that are very hard to measure, e.g. the next time that person visits a microstock site they are more likely to notice my name or brand as familiar. Unfortunately for me there are a few photographers called Stephen Gibson, even one sharing the same middle initial... so choose your login / profile name carefully when you are setting up accounts on social media and sharing sites. In some cases I was able include a non hyperlinked url in the image description, (on sites where I could not include a link in my profile), these are noted and will have skewed results. Depending on the site, having a link back to your own website / portfolio can be an SEO thumbs up in a search engine even if you don't see many visitors (this depends on the link having a suitable title and not having a nofollow tag).
Current ConclusionWell I didn't expect a lot of clicks but I did expect to measure more than four!! I thought at first it was somehow to do with nofollow links not being tracked by stats software, but I can see clicks coming in from comments I've made on blogs so that appears to rule that out. I was hoping for these results to show a little more than this, helping to quantify which sites were more useful, clearly I'm measuring the wrong parameters here! The above table leaves me with nothing but the question "how do we measure the impact of our branding" it appears not to be by looking at clicks! I'm certain that people have visited some of my sites after seeing images shared on the websites above, but without better measurement these results leave me unable to devote more than an hour or so each month to such 'photo sharing promotional activities'. In the case of flickr I will still contribute as I find it a useful community, but the other sites will have to lay dormant. Has anyone else seen results from their image uploads that can be directly measured? I'm the first to admit that none of my flickr accounts could be described as popular although they do receive a quite pleasing number of views. I know that this style of promotion is working to some degree, I have one web domain with no content which receives a steady stream of 'Direct address / Bookmark / Link in email' (i.e. the url was typed or the browser did not disclose the referring page). That domain has never had anything more than a holding page on it - I think that's purely off the back of the fact that the domain matches the username (with .com added) I use on some forums and social network sites.
How is isyndica helping? If the results above are anything to go by then you can't afford to spend too much time uploading images to sites like flickr and picasa, the new isyndica promotion feature allows you to distribute your photos to more than just the microstock sites you normally use. Currently isyndica supports 5 'promotion channels' including facebook, flickr and picasa, twitpic and yfrog (both twitter image hosts). Images you choose to 'promote' are resized and watermarked with a quite clever 'fine grid' which I'd think to be almost impossible to remove but squint and you can see the photo composition almost unhindered, this along with an 'isyndica stamp'. This watermarking is an important point, the promotion feature is designed to promote not "give away" images, so while related to the results above it's not a direct help. The promotion feature is free to use for images and costs 2c per video upload. I've only had a quick trial of the promotion with flickr, connecting the service was as simple as logging into flickr and clicking to accept the connection. I'm not quite certain how this can be fitted into my strategy, or quite how these watermarked images will be accepted by viewers on flickr. The twitter possibilities are interesting, and I'd like to see the photographers name or website (perhaps optionally) included in the watermark. I would remind everyone that although I find flickr a great website there is more to it than just uploading photos and I feel that a lot 'ordinary stock' images will be of little interest to flicker viewers, more on that in 7 reasons your photos should be on flickr.
Related Posts: Promoting your microstock portfolio
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| Posted: 03 Apr 2008 10:14 PM PDT  Stuck on something? Need some more help with getting your images online and making sales? Ask us a question by suggesting a topic below, with our experience and knowledge we are open writing a guide on almost any subject related to photography and stock photography / microstock sales and marketing. <!--break--> Make your suggestion for a new guide by adding a comment belowalso check out our FAQ, or just dive head-long into our microstock guides
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The "GFC". I wrote a post back in March that the microstock industry did not seem to be 
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