MicrostockInsider - A guide to selling stock photography on microstock websites

Microstock Expo 2013

Steve Gibson — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 11:17:32 +0000

Registrations have opened for MicrostockExpo 2013 to be held on November 16-17th in Berlin.

Bruce Livingstone has been announced as the Keynote speaker at the conference. Bruce was founder of istockphoto and is CEO of the new photographers co-op stocksy. This year's event will feature separate tracks for photographers, illustration and video masterclasses, all tailored for "serious contributors".

Tickets are available now for 249 Euros + VAT (Early bird price before June 1st. ). You can register, subscribe for updates as they are announced and find full details on the official website at microstockexpo.com

Use promotion code MSI2013 to get an extra 20% off your ticket price
microstockexpo.com/register

For latest updates check our facebook and twitter pages.

Advertise Here

Feb 2013 Microstock News Digest

Steve Gibson — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 06:10:02 +0000

It's certainly been an interesting start to the year. The period from Jan to March has often been the time when agencies announce changes to commission structures and pricing, often choosing a nice time in amongst some other controversy to quietly slip a press release out. Note: even if you only skim over the threads and blog posts linked to here, this post will take a long time to get through!

D-Day a.k.a. Deactivation Day

Unless you've been a long way away from civilization (and yes it does happen... life often gets in the way of the blogosphere!) you will probably already be aware of the events surrounding iStockphoto and Google docs, here's a recap:

In August last year Google announced a scheme where users of Google docs could browse for images on the Gettyimages site thinkstock.com for a stock image that they would like to use in their Google docs presentations for free (explanation via the istock forum). Google docs users could request that those images be added to a collection of images that were freely available to use by all users of Google docs. I heard this story several times - as I recall it was peddled by all involved on various occasions and I (feeling rather guilty about this now) completely dismissed it as "marketing waffle"; not the first story like this. I assumed there must be strings on the image use, or that the photographers involved would be fairly compensated (noting that you could request images to be added rather than any guarantee of getting a specific chosen image).

In early January the story came to the attention of the wider microstock community. A post from Sean Locke on his blog sums up the story quite well at that time with some good links to related posts.

Microstockers organised themselves en-masse to demonstrate their upset by deactivating the images they had on istockphoto on the 2nd of Feb. People talked of 'revolt', although I thought it was perhaps a bit far to describe it as the "Getty/IS/Google atrocities", but I do understand the upset.

So what happened as a result?

Initially it was all a bit like the feeling you get the day after a big party. MicrostockPosts wrote a review of it all. At that stage there was not really a conclusion; neither 'side' had much to say.

About a week later Sean Locke and several others were unceremoniously ousted from the istock ranks with a 30 day notice of termination (link to Sean Lockes blog). There has been fair representation in the comments on many sites about this event from both pro- and (quite a lot of) anti-microstock.

Regardless of whether you sit in the "serves you all right don't bite the hand that feeds" or "I can't believe they did that to you Sean", I can't see a benefit for either party in this besides some corporate muscle flexing and perhaps a new creative direction for the contributors involved, nobody won anything:

The winner, if there is one, might, out of all of this be the fortuitously timed project from iStock founder Bruce Livingstone stocksy.com. Very little is publicly known about this photographer co-operative start-up but it's probably the most exciting start-up prospect since depositphotos entered the industry throwing money at everyone.

To take away from all this?

Getty have signalled that they are willing to loose huge numbers of stock photos, and all the sales from one of their top-five selling photographers rather than bend to the opinion of their contributors.

Shutterstock Referrals and Bigstock Subscriptions

Shutterstock have been 'tweaking' their referral system. The process started last year when they announced they were closing their in-house buyer referral system (pdf file) at affiliate.shutterstock.com; to all those who were not also Shutterstock contributors. Those with contributor accounts were unaffected so Shutterstock are still tracking buyer leads with their own in-house system. In almost fifteen years of making money via referral marketing I've never seen any good come from a company that outsourced what was a perfectly operational in-house managed program; to me it makes little sense to outsource when you have already built a working platform that you still plan to run (for the time being at least). It took me the best part of a month to get in touch with someone at shutterstock. Their previous referral marketing manager had left the company; no one was checking his or his assistants shutterstock emails, no replies to the form on the affiliate.shutterstock.com or emails to the address listed. I do now have a direct contact with someone at shutterstock, but if everyone else was in the same position surely a lot of work has been done to undo the network of affiliate websites the previous manager had drawn into the shutterstock fold.

You might be asking what all this means to you as a photographer, and while you can draw your own conclusions, to me this is a bad news sign for all involved with Shutterstock. iStock appeared to all but destroy then own buyer referral system a couple of years back by needlessly breaking/changing links, and by adding another outsourced system to confuse things some more. At the time some people suggested that istock had achieved exactly what they intended to do by making the system so inconvenient and so unlikely to pay out that few people would actually need to be paid anything.

To chase this up Shutterstock then went on to announce changes to their in-house photographer referral system. Contributors were paid a small commission on downloads from each photographer they referred, for life. (perhaps it was too good to be true) those commissions will now end after two years. A admit that this does bring Shutterstock into line with the other top agencies who have in many cases simply closed their photographer referral interests. The single benefactor here being Shutterstock, they no longer have to pay as much money.

Finally, and perhaps the most disturbing considering the ownership of Bigstock by Shutterstock, an announcement about a new subscription offering at Bigstock. Recalling that it was not so very long ago that Bigstock was a nice complementing site to Shutterstock, SS being primarily subscription and BS being credits/downloads based. What was disturbing was the numbers here: 25c per download, tiered up to 38c if you achieved a (fairly unachievable) 50k downloads in the previous year.

The less cynical among us didn't read too many negative things into the Shutterstock IPO when it was announced "it will all be about the shareholder and profits from now on" etc. I thought the IPO was mostly good news; I might be changing my mind a little. There did seem to be a time when Shutterstock stood out as an example of an agency that got the business model just right; I remember thinking at one time that 38c was not really enough compensation for a high resolution download, but as other agencies dropped their rates Shutterstock started to look more and more attractive. I can't help but have a somewhat uneasy feeling about that 38c figure and any mention of change at an agency whose subscription model has been virtually unchanged for eight years. If 25c works on Bigstock then it might work on other sites too, not a happy prospect.

And Finally...

It almost seems trivial to talk about a new yaymicro ipad app, a roundup of 2013 prices on mystockphoto, or a pond5 review on microstockdiaries

Microstock group did however post a rather interesting infographic, as a taste of the results of their contributors survey.

For latest updates check our facebook and twitter pages.

Advertise Here

2012 Independent Microstock Survey

Steve Gibson — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 01:47:45 +0000

It's that time of the year again.... For the fifth year running MicrostockGroup have announced their Independent microstock survey. Last year's survey had well over 700 responses and was quoted in the Shutterstock IPO listing. The survey follows a very similar format to previous years with a little more breakdown for media type (photo, illustration, video, audio). If you have your numbers ready, the entire survey shouldn't take more than 5 minutes to answer. Tyler at microstock group tells us they have tried to keep the survey as short as possible while still gathering enough information for it to be interesting to everyone.

Complete the Survey Now

Analysis of the survey results from previous years is posted on the microstockgroup blog

For latest updates check our facebook and twitter pages.

Advertise Here

StockPerformer Review

Steve Gibson — Mon, 21 May 2012 07:16:52 +0000

Stockperformer is an online microstock sales analysis tool. It was launched to select photographers at microstockexpo late last year, and is now available for general use. There is a 14 day free trial available. The system provides analysis of your sales on the top 4 agencies, istockphoto, shutterstock, fotolia and dreamstime.

I’ve dragged my feet a little in getting this review online; stats analysis is not the sexiest subject to write about and reviewing a new tool like this tends to make me think of hours creating image groups and pasting in account details for agencies. WRONG! Stockperformer is amazingly simple to use! If you have used microstock stat/sales analysis tools before this is nothing like them!

No passwords required, stock performer scrapes data from your browser session, so you just log in to your agencies as you would do normally and Stockperformer does the rest in the background.
Hosted service, there’s no software to install except for a browser plugin, currently supports Firefox, Chrome and Safari.
Simple learning curve, it just imports your lightboxes/galleries/sets from each agency (except Fotolia lightboxes?). You don’t need to learn another tool to manage image groups, if you already have organized your images into groups at the agencies then there is no further ‘leg work’ to do.

So what can I do with it?

The analysis interface is split into main sections:

“Overview” provides real time stats on your most recent sales, charts of overall sales across your entire portfolio.

“Top Sales” lets you see a matrix of top selling image revenue and download volume by agency per day, week, month, quarter or annually.

“Collections” is a listing that lets you see at a glance which groups of images at which agencies are good sellers and which are “lessons learned”.

Clicking an image in any section brings you to an image details page:

Collections is by far the most interesting feature of the product (for me). If you have already used shutterstock's “catalog manager” then you will already know the power this feature has. You can see Downloads, Revenue, STR , RPD and RPI for each collection and then view collection details, where you can easily sort images by each relevant value:

Typical image collection page: (squashed a little to fit)

The Stockperformer blog has some great ideas to get started with Analysis of Collections and goes into more details on some of the things you can learn. The blog also has some other great posts including "How to best select your Exclusive+ and Photo+ Files" and "Understanding Microstock Metrics" (glossary explanation).

Conclusion

It’s almost flawless! I had a bit of a glitch with Fotolias Lightboxes/Collections and some of Fotolia’s stats (no data from Feb 2007 until Jan 12…) and of course that old Fotolia spanner is still thrown in: not being able to separate free earnings from paid ones; this skews some statistics but it won't affect everyone, and it’s certainly not stockperformers fault!

It’s all very very slick! Well thought out, and best of all it's simple to use.

Find out more about stockperformer and the free trail on their website, or follow them on Facebook or Twitter.

For latest updates check our facebook and twitter pages.

Advertise Here

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.

For latest updates check our facebook and twitter pages.

Advertise Here

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?

For latest updates check our facebook and twitter pages.

Advertise Here

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 rationale for 'giving the images away'; this very important factor is not included in the table.

The results do 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.

Related Posts:

Promoting your microstock portfolio

For latest updates check our facebook and twitter pages.

Advertise Here

Suggest a topic

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

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 to writing a guide on almost any subject related to photography and stock photography / microstock sales and marketing.

Make your suggestion for a new guide by adding a comment below

also check out our FAQ, or just dive head-long into our microstock guides

For latest updates check our facebook and twitter pages.

Advertise Here