MicrostockInsider - A guide to selling stock photography on microstock websites

December 2011 Microstock News

Steve Gibson — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 04:46:12 +0000

Well the holiday season certainly does compress time doesn't it!

Sadly it I fear that my planned in depth review of the microstockexpo has been a casualty, although a draft post is well under way, I don't think it's going to see the light of day in a reasonably timely manner. To encapsulate it in a nutshell - it was an excellent event, you can watch the videos on the website, and like any conference most of what I learned (and most of the value) was from conversations outside of the organized sessions. Again, thanks to all those who I met who shared their insights with me.

The (New) Istockphoto Referral Program

last month istock announced some changes to their referral program, some rather inconvenient ones. After several weeks of chewing over this I still can't work out what on earth they are thinking...

First point to make clear is that the new program is much better than the old one, (I feel the old one was little more than lip service so that's little consolation)

The new referral scheme offers users a choice of 20 credits, a flat referral fee of $20 or a 20% cut of the first sale of referred buyers with 30 day cookie length. This replaces the previous offer of a flat $10 for referred buyers.

Inconveniently after accepting the new referral program the old referral links no longer operate. I can't see a good reason why the old links could not remain in operation (with the old $10 referral if that's easier).

To confuse the situation istock are also offering an affiliate program via link connector (which I joined earlier in the year) this offers a similar 20% rate for new buyers and also 10% for existing buyers.

I then received a message from istock:

"The Affiliate acknowledges and agrees that, with respect to the promoting of iStockphoto's Services and/or iStockphoto's Site through LinkConnector, the Affiliate may not also: i) be a member of any referral program operated independently by iStockphoto, ii) promote iStockphoto through any affiliate marketing network other than LinkConnector, or iii) be part of or a member of any other organization or entity that agrees to pay, give, distribute, reward or otherwise provide any kind of benefit, in any manner whatsoever, for promoting iStockphoto's Services and/or iStockphoto's Site."

I asked istock why this was:

"Both the affiliate and referral programs are available to any partner wishing to promote iStockphoto. However, we've made a business decision to not pay the same partner more than once for a single sale. We needed to update our terms and conditions both on the affiliate and referral programs to reflect this policy and then leave the choice up to you. Since you are currently enrolled in both programs, you will have 30 days to choose which program to continue promoting iStockphoto by updating your links to those available for that program."

I thought this reply was more of a brush off than an answer. "we've made a business decision". It would be easy to believe that it might be because there is a risk of a double payout. But unless I'm mistaken, if two different sites send a buyer to istock using referral or affiliate links, only one gets paid (usually the most recent to send overwrites the cookie).

The whole thing makes me think of the response I wrote to someones comment about istock earlier in the month: "partially paralyzed by what seems like an internal morass of 'big business'".

To sum up the new programs:

Referral Program (on istockphoto)
New Customer = $20, 20 credits or 20% of the sale

Affiliate Program (link connector)
New Customer = 20% of the sale
Existing Customer = 10% of the sale.

Almost everyone I have met feels that the old istock program was the worst in the industry, most refusing to ever use the links due to the conversion rate.

Over the past couple of years there has been much debate about exactly how much (if any) istock is loosing ground to it's competitors (the results of any one individual always being conveniently obfuscated by differences in exclusives and non-exclusive earnings). Implementing a new referral program to try and match the competition (one that people might actually want to use) is one of the clearest signs of seen so far confirming this. I'm certainly not convinced that buyers will be persuaded, if istock is loosing buyers (perhaps deservedly so) more advertising will bring them back but is not guaranteed to make them stay. Their own sponsored own surveys have shown that most of their customers buy from multiple agencies and have little loyalty.

News from other Agencies

123rf announced they are accepting footage submissions. According to a press release they have approximately 30,000 videos their database and are planning to launch the collection to buyers in January 2012.

Stockfresh published some leaderboards of contributors http://stockfresh.com/artists

Panthermedia announced a relaunch offering 13 million images, 40,000 contributors.

Deposit photos reached 5 million images, adding 1 million in the last three months. Their press release went on to tell us that Yuri has uploaded is latest collection of 17,000 premium microstock images to their site. By virtue of upload so may images Yuri holds the honor of adding the 5 millionth image. Impressive stuff for a agency launched in 2009.

Deposit photos also launched a tax centre to match most of the other major agencies and also announced it was accepting editorial images.

Photodune increased commissions for non-exclusive artists, increasing from 25% up to 33%.

Blog Highlights

Power of the crowd on microstockposts

2011 review infographic from picniche

My Experience creating an industry conference from microstockdiaries

Licensing images in today's market on the microstockgroup blog

Monthly marketplace sales record from envato

2011 Wrap Up

Two things stand out in microstock for me over the past year:

First, the continued homogenisation on the industry. (shutterstock on demand v. veer subscription, and almost everyone offering video, editorial etc). It seems this will move ever further with sites like envato/photodune offering a single place to download a wide range of creative related digital products. The playing field among the big 3/4 microstock agencies seems more level than it ever was.

Second was the contrast in the ways that agencies are managing their 'crowds' of contributors and communicating with them. The larger agencies feel ever more distant. This might be because of an influx of 'new' agencies (deposit photos and others) who, perhaps by virtue of being smaller at present feel 'friendly'. This was for me highlighted in the various pieces of 'bad news' announced over the past 18 months, istock and their commission structure contrasted with veer and their introduction of subscriptions. Both handled in different ways. It might be a little unfair of me to compare the two; one was hard-face profiteering, the other was just plain stupidity(?) and that might account for the differences in response.

It's a little like communist dictators facing civil unrest, either send in the troops and stamp it out callously; or risk showing some weakness and back down to maintain order; essentially the agencies are stuck between a rock and a hard place, and once the crowd gets militant there is little anyone can do to stop it.

If an agency is at the edge of a cliff, then taking a step too far means there is no easy way to take step back...

Wishing you all a creative and fruitful 2012 - Steve.

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Fotolia New Commission Rates

Steve Gibson — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 10:29:41 +0000

Fotolia have announced a new commission structure which will come into effect next week. The changes will reduce commission to lower non-exclusive fotolia rank contributors by around 20% (e.g. white rank commission reduced from 25% of sale to 20% of sale). Low ranking exclusive photographers fare even worse dropping from 42% to 35%.

The table below shows the new rates, (hover over the image to show the old rates). Clicking the image currently links to a page at fotolia displaying the new rates before they come into effect.

Fotolia state that the changes are due to the changing market and the need to sustain marketing efforts. "Fotolia continues to maintain photographer commissions at a significantly higher than those of our major competitors, and our increased efforts in marketing will result in an even higher velocity towards increased rankings."

thread on microstockgroup

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Introducing PicWorkflow

Steve Gibson — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 03:59:58 +0000

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.

Read the full review.

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Changes to iStockphoto Royalty Structure

Steve Gibson — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 05:54:39 +0000

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 Goalposts

Canisters 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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Looking Back, Looking Forward

Steve Gibson — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 13:00:06 +0000

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.

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 change

Towards 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

The "GFC". I wrote a post back in March that the microstock industry did not seem to be affected by the global financial crisis. Last month Fotolia were telling us how much they grew during the crisis. I also read Getty contributors talking about sales 'falling of the edge of a cliff', microstock did not follow suit, but I'm not gloating about that. Any 'death' in the macrostock world, perhaps we should say 're-alignment', not only reduces of the ability for microstockers to 'move up' into premium images but also makes for a whole lot more overcrowding in microstock as macro photographers dump portfolios. Fotolia invited macro photographers to do just that with some enticements in their operation level ground, most things that FT do, if not popular, are quite shrewd - lessons in how to weather a storm.

Looking Forward, Plans and the Future

Looking 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.

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Comparison of Popular Search Keywords

Steve Gibson — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 07:50:46 +0000

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".

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 Set

I 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:

Graph of search terms vs search volume for top 100 searches.

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.

Comparison

Armed 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 100

For 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.

Rank	Keyword	Frequency	Rank	Keyword	Frequency	Rank	Keyword	Frequency
1	people	18818	34	doctor	2059	67	animals	1455
2	(blank)	16332	35	nude	1998	68	fish	1448
3	music	8971	36	party	1977	69	construction	1422
4	fruit	8922	37	fire	1905	70	flower	1412
5	christmas	7589	38	medical	1887	71	fruits	1410
6	business	5508	39	hands	1880	72	dancing	1379
7	food	5413	40	child	1864	73	cat	1341
8	woman	5008	41	kids	1818	74	rose	1341
9	family	4787	42	tree	1818	75	sky	1327
10	computer	4647	43	education	1798	76	heart	1317
11	children	3731	44	golf	1787	77	home	1306
12	baby	3708	45	sports	1772	78	camera	1284
13	car	3452	46	wine	1758	79	sun	1281
14	dance	3433	47	massage	1745	80	birthday	1254
15	house	3191	48	coffee	1737	81	shopping	1249
16	money	3162	49	hand	1663	82	paper	1243
17	school	3119	50	fashion	1650	83	girls	1235
18	sex	3093	51	earth	1643	84	eye	1217
19	wedding	3058	52	face	1629	85	students	1202
20	book	2977	53	health	1623	86	beauty	1189
21	girl	2845	54	horse	1621	87	world	1177
22	football	2707	55	phone	1597	88	winter	1161
23	women	2611	56	snow	1587	89	pizza	1107
24	beach	2586	57	nature	1587	90	computers	1076
25	water	2510	58	student	1556	91	film	1076
26	apple	2459	59	smile	1549	92	spa	1075
27	love	2406	60	globe	1532	93	law	1066
28	dog	2384	61	hair	1531	94	dogs	1063
29	books	2349	62	fitness	1530	95	chocolate	1049
30	man	2264	63	soccer	1521	96	beer	1027
31	sport	2193	64	guitar	1509	97	tv	1022
32	office	2177	65	flowers	1473	98	space	1020
33	cars	2101	66	sexy	1471	99	cake	995
						100	london	994

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 some

Heres 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'.

Conclusion

It 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?

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Measuring My Self Promotion Results

Steve Gibson — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 07:37:06 +0000

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.

Site	Images Uploaded	Approx Monthly Views	Click Through	Image Type + Notes
Flickr.com	901	2000	0	Travel images
Flickr.com	193	No Stats	0	Stock Portfolio
Flickr.com	109	No Stats	0	Personal Images
Stockvault	43	4000	3	Reduced Resolution Stock Images
Webshots	300+	2000	0 *	Travel Photos (* no direct hyperlink makes measurement impossible)
Panoramio	51	Unknown	0	Travel Photos (geo tagged)
Picasa	2000	4000(guesstimate)	0	Travel Photos (linked in description)
Morguefile	18 Free + 22 CC	1000(guesstimate)	0 *	Sample Stock, (lots of views, no hyperlink makes tracking impossible)
sxc.hu	36	800(guesstimate)	1	Sample stock images (reduced resolution)

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 Conclusion

Well 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.

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admin — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 05:14:04 +0000

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