Microstock Photography results for August 2008

Not a bad month considering.  I was lucky with a couple of Extended licenses at Shutterstock and Fotolia , otherwise it could have been a disaster.  Shutterstock is trending down and I dont think this is just me.  My referrees are down about 50% this month on the average for 2008.  Other sites are ticking along nicely but slowly.  I really need to start editing photos and getting them online.

Below are percentages for the month to show how I have been going:

26% shutterstock
10% dreamtime
14% Fotolia
17% istockphoto
5% bigstockphoto
9% 123RF
19% StockXpert
0% Featurepics

I have decided I am not doing this Blog proud.  I am not keeping up with market news.  If you want news about the microstock industry, the best source is on Lee Torrens Blog who is making a very good job of publicising what is happening in the Microstock world.  I will keep publishing my monthly results but my main focus will be on my personal blog and to get through the 10,000 photos I took on my last holiday (while keeping my day job).  So add my personal blog to your RSS feed - http://cj-photography.blogspot.com/- and have a look at Lee’s for Microstock news.

Previous results for 2008:

July 2008 Earnings

June 2008 Earnings
May 2008 Earnings
April 2008 Earnings
March 2008 Earnings
Feb 2008 Earnings
Jan 2008 Earnings

Microstock’s main market don’t use photos

iStock commissioned a survey of small and medium businesses in the UK to determine how they use images in their marketing.  The key finding are:

• 27% of SMBs don’t use imagery in their business at all
• Of organisations who use imagery, 51% use imagery on their website, 40% use imagery in presentations, 31% use imagery in marketing & advertising collateral and 14% use imagery in the office interior design
• 71% of SMBs use photography more than other types of imagery
• The majority of SMBs, still go in-house to source images, with 59% taking photos with their own camera, compared with 40% using online stock photography and 31% commissioning photography

See here for more detail

New Article on Getty and iStock

As part of filings made with the SEC, Getty has had to disclose some information which it would normally keep secret. 

One interesting quote is:

"The introduction of microstock has significantly increased the availability and usage of stock imagery. The advent of affordable high-end digital cameras and broadband Internet access has enabled semi-professional and hobbyist photographers to greatly expand the supply of digital stock imagery, and low microstock prices have put stock images within reach of far more potential customers. The primary consequence of the introduction of microstock has been to open the creative stock imagery market to new segments of users. Small and medium-sized businesses represent a large customer segment for which stock imagery was previously too expensive. For example, a dental practice might now include a microstock image of a boy brushing his teeth on its mailers to patients, whereas before it might have only shown a drawing of a tooth and toothbrush (or perhaps just a message in formatted text) on its appointment reminders because of the relatively high cost of stock imagery. Microstock also enables traditional stock image users to cost-effectively use stock images for interim uses such as storyboarding, customer pitches and internal presentations. Previously these applications would have contained lower quality, freely available images, or hand-drawn sketches. Customer research suggests that approximately 40-50% of microstock demand is comprised of entirely new end-uses, such as those described above. As a result of the combination of new customer segments and new end uses, volumes of microstock images are 15-20x greater than traditional stills.

Another interesting part is a comparison of sales volume between Getty and iStock, the market leader of macrostock and microstock respectively:

More details at this article from pdn.

The filings at the SEC are found here.

Article on iStock

An interetting article from the British Journal of Photography. It talks briefly about what istockphoto earns, the top earners and what the "average" contributor can expect. Extract below or click the link above for the full article:

[ istockphoto has] 4000 contributors, and if that figure remained even, they would be earning an average more like $5225 last year. Then you have to calculate that against the costs of the shoots, factoring in how many images you need to hit a premium and how often you need to refresh your portfolio. Lee Torrens, who runs a blog called Microstock Diaries, calculates that each of his images at iStockphoto generates just 30 cents a year. Compared against nine other micro-stock agencies he has images with, iStockphoto paid the best return. The worst, CanStockPhoto, delivered just one cent per image.

iStock - the race for my first flame

I currently have 2 photos sitting on 98 downloads so only 2 downloads away from getting flame status (ie 100DL). They really are two completely different stories about how I get my photos for microstock.

The first (Moroccoan Entrance) was taken in Morroco in Christmas 2005 when I was doing a tour there. It wasn't taken specifically for stock as I hadn't started that yet as I had only just got my DSLR and was still learning how everything worked. I got around to uploading it in October 2006 (I only started half way through 2006) and it has sold 5.2 times per month.

The second photo (Vineyard)was taken when I was back in New Zealand on holiday (NZ is my home but I was living in London at the time. I had driven past this vineyard so many times when I was younger - it has an amazing position where it rises up a hill away from an intersection (hard to describe but it looks amazing). Anyway, I was driving past there and thought it would make a great stock photo. So I jumped out, rattled off a few shots and eventually uploaded it at the end of June 07 - it now sells about 10 times per month.

So the race is on. For the past two months I have kept my eye on them because based on averages, they should both reach 100Dl in the same month. Hopefully it will be soon.

iStock goes for subscription service

A new feture to the microstock landscape - istock , the biggest agency has decided to offer a subscription service. While I dont think it is a good as the subscription service offered by shutterstock I am sure it will be a great success because they already have such a big slice of the market, this can only increase it.

FAQ for Contributors on Subscription
kkthompson Apr 04/08, 11:54
Is there a minimum payout? Yes. We'll guarantee the same minimum payout as we do today on the Pay-as-you-go side. … more Is there a minimum payout?
Yes. We'll guarantee the same minimum payout as we do today on the Pay-as-you-go side. So right now, the lowest priced (non-sale) credit is 96¢. You receive 20 to 40% of that. Clear canisters will receive a minimum 19¢ and Diamonds will receive a minimum 38¢. And yes, this means that sometimes iStock will be paying out more than we take in per credit.

What's the maximum payout available?
Contributors stand to make more per file than they've ever made before from iStock. Here are two examples of what a non-exclusive can make off subscriptions:
- If a subscriber with a daily credit limit of 480 uses only 10 credits that day, all on one of your files, you'd earn 480 × 20% × $130*. That means a payout of about $26 for your single file.
- If a subscriber with a daily credit limit of 30 uses only 10 credits that day, including 5 credits on your image, you'd earn (30/2) × 20% × $10*. A payout of about $1.

* These values are 'Credit Package Value per Day', and have not been set yet. They are for illustrative purposes only.

Who gets the money when no credits are used on a day?
iStock does. This will offset the times where iStock will be paying out more in royalties than was paid for the credit, because of the guaranteed minimum on these days.

Why are you doing it this way?
This way we share in the risk and reward with the contributors, and still guarantee no less than what's currently paid out.

Will there be cannibalization of Pay-as-you-go?
Some clients will migrate to the new model, but we think we'll have lots of new customers that couldn't use our services before. Remember, this was one of the most requested features by people who wanted to become customers.

How often will stats be udpated?
Because Subscription credits expire daily, we'll update them once per day after everything has been tallied (i.e. after midnight for the day before).

Is this royalty structure set in stone?
We've modeled the subscription plan on a number of assumptions. If after we have a few months data, we find we were off on our assumptions, we'll revisit the royalty structure.

Istock sales expected to double by 2012

Interesting article about Getties results and how they expect the microstock market to expand and traditional stock houses to shrink. Click the link below for the full article.

Getty: iStockphoto Sales Could Total $262M In 2012

March 28, 2008

By Daryl Lang

Getty Images projects that its iStockphoto division will more than double in size by 2012, reaching $262 million in annual sales.

At the same time, traditional royalty-free and rights-managed stock licensing is expected to shrink by a quarter, down from more than half of Getty's revenues to just 29 percent in 2012.

IStockphoto earned $22 million in 2006 and $72 million in 2007, according to figures in a document dated February 7.

A November 2007 report projected that iStockphoto will earn $122 million this year and $262 in 2012.

If counted separately from Getty Images, iStockphoto would probably be the world's third-largest stock agency this year. (The top two agencies, Getty and Corbis, each generate hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenues. Jupiterimages, generally regarded as third place, reported $108 in annual revenues for 2007.)

Link

6 sites with over 1 million images

There are now 6 sites that have over 1 million images. New entries are bigstockphoto and 123RF . bigstockphoto gave a prize but 123RF did it on the quiet so I am not exactly sure when they passed the mark.

These sites are “the big six” but it is interesting that most people (including myself) rate StockXpert within this crowd, even though they have fewer photos.

I guess the key statistic is number of buyers to photos but no site will ever release this info so we must judge attractiveness to buyers by the number of photos. As far as attractiveness to seller goes, site ratings (ie alexa) and users experiences (such as my month stats) are a better indication.

It is also interesting to note that Fotolia has reduced the number of photos it has from over 3 million to 1.9 with the release of v2 of its site. I am not sure whether this is due to a more accurate count (lots of people disputed its previous number) or whether they deleted over 1 million photos as part of their clean up (they were to delete photos with no sales in 18m). By sales though, I still believe it warrants its top 4 status but definitely not the number 1 spot.

The latest photos numbers are:

Fotolia 1,961,129
shutterstock 1,971,332
istockphoto 1,813,000
dreamtime 1,300,000+
bigstockphoto 1,179,000
123RF 1,000,000+
StockXpert 569,397+
Featurepics 301,275

Microstock article in the Seattle Times

Another day, another article. Microstock must be one of the hot topics for technology writers as here is another article that has featured in a major US newspaper.

This article follows Kelly Cline, a photographer exclusive with iStock.

What this article misses out is that while making good money is possible, it is not easy. Getting 1,400 images onto iStock takes time (they don’t accept all photos) and some photos sell better than others.

Extracts from the article (full link below)

Microstock photography represents a new business model
By Kim Peterson
Seattle Times technology reporter
Monday, May 28, 2007
Kelly Cline's photographs pop up all over the place — in grocery stores, on Web sites, even splashed on the wall of a supermarket in Serbia.

Cline, who lives in West Seattle, takes pictures of food and sells them online through iStockphoto, a division of Seattle-based Getty Images. Her shots of hand-pressed olive oils, cheeses and California strawberries are available for anyone to purchase, and the response is so strong that Cline said she expects to make about $70,000 this year. She has nearly 1,400 images on iStockphoto and has sold about 69,000 downloads.

"I've never made this much money before," said Cline, 38.

A handful make enough to quit their day jobs. IStockphoto's top-selling photographer expects to make at least $100,000 this year.

"It's the most satisfying job I had ever had in my life," said Cline, who used to work at a printing company. "I can't imagine going back to an office. I think it would probably kill me."

With sophisticated digital cameras now less than $1,000, even amateur photographers can break into the business, submitting their pictures to microstock photography Web sites and collecting a small commission for each image sold.

"We're just now seeing people look at the model and say, 'Hey, this is really successful,' " said Bruce Livingstone, iStockphoto's founder.

IStockphoto's big break came last year, when it was acquired by Getty for $50 million. Getty zeroed in on iStockphoto in 2005 when it began researching microstock photography. By the fall of that year, Livingstone was talking acquisition over breakfast in Madison Park with Getty Chief Executive Jonathan Klein.

Still, Getty was known for high-quality, high-end images, not the cheap photographs iStockphoto specialized in. So instead of integrating the company into Getty, Klein opted to keep iStockphoto separate and allow it to grow in Calgary; it now has 56 employees.

Some estimates place the entire stock-photography market at about $2 billion worldwide. There's little chance of the microstock segment taking over the market, said Andy Goetze, an independent analyst tracking the industry.

"It is still a long, long way to go until iStockphoto will count for $100 million of Getty Images' overall revenues, if ever," he said.

But there's no question that iStockphoto is eating into Getty's business. Customers who were once willing to spend hundreds of dollars on a Getty image are now finding a decent image on iStockphoto for much less.

But Klein estimates that the customer overlap is only about 15 percent. In other words, he thinks that 85 percent of iStockphoto customers would never have ordered from Getty Images. And Getty can seize that opportunity to sell more expensive images to the customer.

Sites like Google Images also present a challenge to the entire industry. If you wanted a picture of a rose, for example, you could find dozens of nice shots on Google's image site.

Using those images without permission from owners could amount to copyright infringement, but it's done anyway.

"Ninety percent of people who use images are stealing them every day."

Link

Microstock photography results for April

I am overseas at the moment so just a quick post to update the stats for April:

23% shutterstock
17% dreamtime
14% Fotolia
20% istockphoto
5% bigstockphoto
5% 123RF
10% StockXpert
3% Featurepics
0% Canstock
0% Galastock
3% LuckyOliver

500 DL at iStock

Well I finally made 500 DL at istock today not that I will be going exclusive there.

It took me a while to get this as I gave up with iStock due to the number of rejections I was getting. However, my workflow has now improved and after I saw both the number of DL increasing, and the $ per DL increasing, I thought it was about time to start uploading again. It is now up to my second/third best producing microsite (with half the pictures).

Hopefully the next milestock wont take so long.

Here is the photo that brought me up to the 500 which incidently is my top seller (at 58). Thank you everyone who has bought this or rated it (or any of my other photos).


Link

iStock to sell images to mobile phones

iStock have just announced a new deal to sell photos as wall paper on mobile phones. The plan is for a pilot scheme in the UK with 5000 photos but to roll it out worldwide with their full library.

No work yet on how much they will be sold for but I assume it will be the same as a small photo - $1.

I have always thought this is a huge market ready to be exploited.

Extract from article (full link below):

iStockphoto and AMUSE launch UK Mobile deal
April 10, 2007
Calgary, Alberta – iStockphoto®, the world’s most visited stock imagery and video site, has selected AMUSE Entertainment Group B.V. to take its stock photography images into the mobile sector. The pilot phase of the program will be launched in the UK and will allow mobile users to download wallpapers from a selection of 5,000 of iStockphoto’s quality images. Images will be found within a dedicated mobile storefront accessed through the iStockphoto website, and marketed and promoted jointly by iStock and AMUSE. Images will be made available to UK mobile phone subscribers on the 3, Orange, O2, T-Mobile, Virgin Mobile and Vodafone networks and will be delivered via mBlox, the world’s largest mobile transaction network.
“People want their gadgets to feel uniquely theirs, including their mobile phones,” said Garth Johnson, vice president of business development at iStockphoto.

LINK

Microstockphoto - October results

It was my best ever month..

Below are percentages for the month to show how I have been going:

20% shutterstock (BEST EVER MONTH - BEM)
17% dreamtime (2nd BEM)
9% Fotolia (BEM)
13% istockphoto (BEM)
4% bigstockphoto
25% 123RF (BEM)
7% StockXpert
1% Featurepics
2% Canstock
1% Galastock
1% LuckyOliver

123RF is high this month as I had an Extended License sale (EL) on which I earned a lot more that the normal 0.3 - $2. An EL is where the buyer gets additional rights with the purchase, for example being able to do bigger print runs. Most sites do them but to date, I have only had a couple. Due to the small size of my portfolio, this messed up the percentages a bit. Normally it is only about 7% with the others obviously picking up the difference.

I have also added above the smaller sites that I upload to. As you can see, not a lot going on there. I am supporting them in the hope they will take off but at this point, it doesn't look like they will be catching up to the big boys any time soon.

shutterstock continues to be my pick as it continues to get consistant high sales, so if you haven't joined up yet, have a look:

My guess for the site to improve most is Fotolia . It has a huge portfolio of photos and their marketing is only starting (they are less than 1 year old). They have multi-language sites and have quite a focus in Europe where the other sites dont seem to be as focused.

Galastock and LuckyOliver - the new microstock sites

In the past couple of months, a couple of new microstock sites have popped up: LuckyOliver and Galastock. I have now got my photos onto them and can report sales at both, though very slow. This is to be expected as they haven't started marketing yet.

LuckyOliver looks very slick and appears to be run my marketing people as they are trying to be unique to get market share. Galastock is more traditional. It will be interesting to see if they survive as the market seems pretty competitive.

If you want to have a look, click on the links or the banner above and you will get taken there:

LuckyOliver
Galastock.

iStock now does video

For anyone who does videos, istock now does videos so have a look.

For those that haven't heard of istock, they sell photos, and now videos, for you. They are cheap, so people can afford to buy them. Each one can sell over and over again so if you have a good image, over time, it can earn you quite a lot.