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.

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 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.

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. 

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?

Related Links

Best selling images and top search terms at pixmac

For latest updates check our facebook and twitter pages.

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.

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.

Picworkflow officially launched of their "in development" retouching service at the start of the month. The service allows photographers to select from a series of processing and retouching options including having each image go through a quality review where retouchers will suggest which services are required or remove services if they feel images are not of sufficient quality. More information via the picworkflow home page. (Read our previous review of the picworkflow distribution and keywording services)

British Journal of Photography reported on the sale of Getty images for 3.3Bn.

Snapixel have announced they will be closing as of 31st Aug, It seems they were the last site to freely host photographers work for sale (payment via commission taken at sale time). Options now are smugmug, photoshelter or a similar services which charge a monthly hosting fee.

Mystockphoto took a look at the Microstockr iPhone App, the app allows contributors to monitor their earnings on 12 agencies.

Panthermedia announced a new pricing structure, the new structure attempts to make the most of popular and "lavishly produced" images while still leaving budget priced images available for price sensitive buyers.

Depositphotos are now accepting video footage, royalty rates as follows: (mouse over to see exclusive rates). More on this at microstockinfos.

For latest updates check our facebook and twitter pages.

September News Digest:

Yuri Arcurs posted "What sells in microstock anno 2012" on his blog. It makes an interesting read; although much of the advice is not exactly new, most of it is well worth re-iterating. The thread in response on microstockgroup kind of sums up my thoughts on it, in particular the sentiments along the lines of "You're dammed if you follow the advice as everyone else will do just the same, and dammed if you don't".

An istockphoto sponsored survey of graphic designers revealed that nothing ground breaking has happened since last year. The designers who are using stock photography (most of them) are using it more often, and 89% of them say that price influences them the most. Noticeably, this year's survey omits to reveal how many designers expressed an istock preference. There is perhaps a slight trend to buyers using more than one agency, but other than that most of the results fall within 3% of each other. Compare with last years survey on mystockphoto.

Sean Locke wrote about istockphotos new Checkout process that allows buyers to purchase images instantly without buying credits. Buying credits still offers frequent buyers the quickest and easiest way to purchase multiple images.

Pond5 announced an Adobe Premier Plugin that affords footage and audio users "Seamless integration" of their collection.

Shutterstock announced the pricing of their IPO, 4.5 million shares at 13-15 dollars a share.

A few posts from microstockdiaries this month, including a review of picworkflow and some tips for the press covering microstock.

Depositphotos announced they were dropping their SMS payment option - more on microstockinfos

Dreamstime published an informative infographic (.pdf) timeline of photography.

For latest updates check our facebook and twitter pages.

A slew of mobile phone microstock stories recently, startups and funding, but a lot of it smelt strongly of press release garbage; some amounting to little more than a new category added or an upload competition. There is clearly interest in mobile phone stock - for now I think it's an interesting niche, and my only concern is that I've underestimated it by all but ignoring it; something I plan to continue doing for the foreseeable future.

What I can say for sure about mobile phone stock:

• You can take the same photo, just as discretely or in a place where you can't take a DSLR using even the cheapest of point and shoot camera - the quality will be far superior and shooting will be easier and faster.
• There is little doubt that there are times when you only have your mobile phone with you, but given the choice then that would be all the time because nobody really enjoys carting professional cameras around. Professional photographers make photo opportunities by going prepared.
• Lower resolution and lower quality limits sales, and low quality is not a synonym for stylish & trendy - you might get the feeling that's the case looking at arty photo sites online, but a quick reality check by looking in the real world reveals a different story.
• You can always argue that phone photography is a way of getting out of a creative rut, rekindling your love of photography, broadening your horizons; so is taking a holiday.

What I can't say with any certainty but have fairly strong suspicions about phone stock:

• It's a good way for an agency to widen the range of editorial sections without contaminating the main section with low quality images.
• Getty got their first with their flickr collection and other agencies before that (regardless of the source the style of image is the same)
• You will kick yourself in a few years time looking back at photos wishing you had taken the DSLR with you and added that vignette and motion blur afterwards.
• Yuri was right. (wrt "instapundit")
• These images are just like the ones that were always available from those agencies that went out of business... you know the ones that printed those lovely catalogue books in monochrome on unbleached paper with embossed bits and fold outs here and there.

Agency Milestones

Dreamstime 15 millionth image

Deposit photos hit 10 million images press release via mystockphoto

YAY micro announced reaching 3 million images

Other Interesting News

Photokore announced plans to target image subscription offers at their markets in Japan and Korea, Offering a different service tailored for each location. Contributors have been given the option to opt-out.

Fotolia launched a new interface for corporate account managers to monitor and consolidate their buying requirements.

123rf opened the doors to audio and launched an ipad browser app for buyers.

Alamy announced that Alamy Blue would drop its commissions from 60% to 50% as they continue to restructure their business. A short video from James West Alamy's CEO explains the changes.

Bigstock (re-?)announced their partner program (microstock resellers API) giving fair rates to photgraphers and offering an opt-out, a few comments on MSG.

On the Web

MicrostockPosts offers some advice for noobs.

Interesting and somewhat rambling thread on microstock group from last month Jon Oringer just sent me an e mail.

A couple of links about dreamstime, looking at converting image misuse rather than sending takedown notices, and another.

istockphoto GDUSA photo survey - (You can ignore the infographic and read the PDF linked at the bottom). Does the omission of any details this year on which agencies designers use confirm istock has lost their market share well and truly? Regardless of that it's still useful and interesting information, and I hope istock continue to sponsor these annual surveys. Regarding what I wrote about phone photos at the start of this post, here is a wise quote from the survey to finish with:

"Provide well-lit, candid style shots in large files sizes. Provide a series of stock shots with same talent/environment (three or more) that can be used in a print or web piece that will provide image continuity.”

Photo Credit: PNetzer / photocase.com

For latest updates check our facebook and twitter pages.

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.

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:

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.

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.

A couple of months between posts always leaves time for a few big stories - no exception here!

There's usually a common thread in these news posts, and in trying to make sense of the last few of months there are a couple of (somewhat vague) common elements to most of the things that have happened:

• Increasing Quality: Both the Yuri "quit" story, new collections and new agencies have all boasted premium or increased quality images and / or prices.
   
• Pulling in all directions at once (aka a lack of a trend). Microstock continues to merge into what was called Traditional Stock, to a point where neither business really fits the description from just a few years ago. In fact I'm getting weary of the somewhat unstable tags of  Traditional Stock and Macrostock. Microstock is still FAR from being "Mainstream Stock" and arguably never will be; the day that happens it probably won't be open to "anyone with a camera". (from a different point of view microstock became mainstream the day it sold more volume that macro)

All that said: The industry has felt like it is tearing apart and at the same time increasing quality while blurring into macrostock for the past 5 years (at least); people have ranted on forums, and dumped agencies, joined new ones, launched their own. So in essence this last few months news has a common thread... It's Microstock Business as Usual.

Yuri Quits Microstock

My first thought is that Yuri Arcurs stopped being a microstock photographer years ago when he became a production company; agreed that as a production company he was selling on microstock sites but the majority of microstockers are not really in the same class (even many of the full time ones).

Secondly, the headline I think is really misleading, Yuri has gone exclusive with Getty (and so iStockphoto), and I don't see it as quitting microstock. I'm not 100% on the details here but looking at his portfolio on iStock I can see 13k images (far less than his full portfolio); looking at the pricing slider, all but around 100 are available at the standard exclusive contributor prices. I'd call that microstock. (There's plenty more of his work which I assume is now only available at a premium price, including perhaps all the new work). Today peopleimages.com is selling xlarge images (3822x3063px) for $5; they seem to be running a special.

Related posts and threads:

New Collections

Shutterstock announced plans for a new image collection called Offset. Offset is available via individual image licenses, not via a subscription, from offset.com (currently invitation preview). Shutterstocks existing contributors are not being used as a source for the images, many are sourced according to shutterstock from "dedicated assignment photographers and illustrators who have never licensed their images as stock before". The two sites will operate completely separately.

In the previous news post I mentioned stocksy the new venture from iStock founder Bruce Livingstone, since then the site has launched at stocksy.com. A couple of related blog posts throw a little more light on the site and what it stands for:

Other Stories

Yaymicro added three new partners to their partner program: Pond5,  Zoomy and Photokore.

Stockfresh newsletter announced reaching 2 million images plus new search features

Pond5 acquired pixmac allowing them (pond5) to develop their "global marketplace".

Shutterstock launched a new keywording tool and published a guide to microstock book in 5 languages.

Photaki posted some conclusions from the microstock point Malaga conference.

Luis Alvarez took a look at the commoditisation of stock on microstockdiaries

Reminder

There are just a couple of days left to take advantage of the early bird pricing in addition to the bonus 20% discount for MicrostockExpo using the code "MSI2013"  (Early bird ends 31 May)

For latest updates check our facebook and twitter pages.

August and September may have been quiet months on the microstock news front, but there was certainly no shortage of 'excitement' in the months before. It now seems a long time ago but to understand the "Yuri has spoken" post fully (if you have not already read it!) it's good to know the related events leading up to it, and so a...

Timeline of Events:

18th May - Yuri Goes Exclusive with Getty

After some speculation Yuri Arcurs posted a message on microstockgroup announcing he was to start working exclusively with getty images (what he actually says is Getty are a good distribution partner and he's removing his images from other agencies).

Sometime around here:

istock start accepting way more images than they normally do, something in the order of "all images including crap that might have been better deleted in camera". I thought it might just be me at first, but no, lots of other people noticed it too.

16 July - iStock Press Release:

After what seemed at the time to be a rather long delay, getty/istock dropped a press release: announcing Yuri as an exclusive photographer:

prnewswire.com/news-releases/istockphoto-announces-exclusive-deal-with-worlds-top-selling-stock-photographer----and-lowers-pricing-on-half-its-library-215622511.html

Couple of thoughts on the release: sounds like rather a lot of spin that istock has exclusive access to "The Arcurs Collection" "only available at istock", which of course is correct, and means pretty much nothing. "The Arcurs Collection" can be an arbitrary title that could be applied to anything (a premium Yuri collection available at another source within the Getty fold for example).

istocks prices have certainly NOT halved: Read between the lines there and you can see that half of the iStock collection is now more expensive - the cost of credits has gone up 25% for me 1.53 up to 2.06 per credit (AUD) and I don't think that can be explained away as a change of US exchange rate, Sean Locke has seen other problems with the pricing and has been keeping a close eye on what changes are being made in a series of blog posts.

"An effortless search experience"? Nice that someone has taken the time to notice and fix it, but it might have been good to make the search work properly 3 years back. Buyers were not "born yesterday" and can spot images with questionable relevancy that have been given prime location simply due to premium price or some other strategic reason known only to istock.

I personally applaud the attempts to simplify what had become a ridiculous plethora of different collections and pricing structures; notwithstanding the fact that istock actually drove themselves towards such a mire in the first place. I can see how plenty of people would be upset at the changes to a "familiar istock": seanlockephotography.com/2013/06/26/istockphoto-angers-contributors-confuses-buyers and a follow up seanlockephotography.com/2013/09/20/buyers-upset-at-constant-istock-changes.

Around the same time (Late June)

There were some comments on whether or not the Shutterstock share prices is or was too high, stemming from the story of Jon Oringer being the first Silicon Alley billionaire due to the share valuation. forbes.com/sites/edwindurgy/2013/06/28/oh-snap-shutterstock-founder-jon-oringer-is-a-billionaire

seekingalpha.com/article/1545712-shutterstock-valuation-makes-me-shudder (that post now in a private archive, parts can still be found at microstockgroup.com/shutterstock-com/shutterstock-valuation-makes-me-shudder/)

If the share price looked high in July wait till you see what it is now! - scroll down for a graph.

16th July - Scoopshot
Press release reveals that Yuri has invested 1.2 (or 1.4) million into scoopshot http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/16/scoopshot. This was followed by various other "phonestock" agencies in various states of maturity posting me-to releases (but none quite like the on-demand angle that scoopshot is taking).

25th July - "Yuri Speaks"
arcurs.com/2013/07/microstock-sees-its-first-major-setback-in-6-years-and-here-is-why

So what do I think:

I can't help but feel that peoplephotos has been less than sparkling. Peoplephotos v2 I have to admit seems very much on message; and looks the business - significant improvement from what was a perfectly functional but not the least bit inspiring v1 website. At the time peoplephotos was launched I wondered if it was a bargaining chip (but surely too elaborate and expensive to just use as leverage).

So far everything Yuri has done seems to have been successful; hard to argue with that considering where he currently stands. Careful and methodical are words that spring to mind, Yuri has lead the way. Peoplephotos was quite some time in the planning and I'd begun to wonder if it was 'bluff ware" - when it actually launched it surprised me a little, but I thought if anyone person can pull it off then it's Yuri. So I found the news of investing in something related to "mobile phone stock" very.... scary, incredible, noticeable!

On reflection you'll notice there mixed signals, on one hand "moving to somewhere that pays him more" and on the other "investing in something that pays much less". I look at that as someone hedging their bets, and in Yuri's position that is probably the wisest thing to do.

Shutterstock share price: well it might have taken a slight downturn at the time Yuri wrote his post. With the benefit of hindsight, by the time we reach early-September the share price is looking higher than ever (there was surge mid-September onwards because of a share sale bringing the stock to an all time high).

(graph c/o yahoo finance)

I have lots of thoughts on "Mobile photography, a serious threat to stock photography?" Which I hope to bring you in the coming post - I'm also looking forward hearing from the mobile stock panel at microstockexpo.

For latest updates check our facebook and twitter pages.

Time flies! It's been ages since the microstockexpo (videos here) definitely time for a round-up of recent microstock news:

MicrostockExpo (Very) Mini Review

Last Novembers microstockexpo was another great event to attend like the first expo. A lot of companies were the promoting their latest 'mobile babies'. I can't help but feel most of the attendees were not all that interested in mobile (perhaps not such a surprise). A common theme across many of the speakers was 'authentic' photography - images that look unstaged and natural. Yuri's keynote was surprisingly open with lots of info on how he manages his business; there was a conflicting message in there which struck a chord with me - At one point he was showcasing some of his photos including highly polished / processed images a few minutes later extolling the virtues of candid and natural looking (I so want to drop the word 'authentic' a second time). I feel that sounds exactly like where we are in microstock, a crossroad between 'cut out on white' (arguably 'safe') and the more creative work we are starting to see on Stocksy, Offset, and indeed from Yuri. The two different image styles in Yuri's keynote mirrors the sentiment I made here regarding shooting simple stuff and also creative at the same time, I appreciate that simple and creative mean different things to different people anyway!

While on the subject of trends:

Shutterstock published a rather nice design trends infographic.

Trends this year: things on wooden backgrounds, lens flares, things that look like they just fell like that, business being done in a conversion, It's all about the story

iStocksubscription

istock announced a new subscription option would be launched in early April, from a post on shutterstock it looks like istocks photographers might have been off looking for pastures greener.

This follows on from Getty announcing that it was closing the photos.com subscription site with customers migrated to thinkstock. Punchchstock and jupiterimages also being closed and re-direted to gettyimages (inspirestock went from Punchstock to 123rf).

It didn't work for Picapp, will it work for Getty?

As you probably already know, Getty have announced that you can use 35 million (40 million?) of their images for free online if you use them via an embedded widget. The widget displays their images along with some advertising on your site. The idea is certainly nothing new, various companies have had a crack at it over the years, picapp (defunct) being the most developed option I ever saw, syndicating "millions" of professional celebrity, sports and tourism images (ideal candidates for bloggers I think) for free in return for you using their code and them getting a chance to show their ads in a popup if a user clicked on the image. Why will this work for Getty? I'm skeptical. Oringer sounded a little on the defensive - i've no idea why felt the need to (is that what shareholders need?). His comment about 99.9% of business being commercial is perhaps not the exact figure plucked from the top of his head but probably not far away from it.

I think by far the most interesting part of this story is Getty getting to grips with what is commercial and non-commercial use. Traditionally anything that was only available for non-commercial use had VERY limited scope for actually being used. Looking a online use only, it's difficult to find any popular website that is not earning some kind revenue from advertising or referrals. These might not be profitable businesses but earning money from adverting is commercial even if it is not covering costs. The definition of commercial has always been woolly (and still is) but Getty have opened to door to their 'non-commercial' use license including blogs that have things like Google adsense on them.

Plenty of discussion on this topic:

BJP Online - Getty Images makes 35 million images free in fight against copyright infringement

MichaelJayFoto - Why Getty decided to offer images for free

PDN Pulse - Why free images are good for photographers

Don't bet on Getty the downside of free

Other things

Best of the Best - Picworkflow did some further analysis based on a blog post and presentation at microstock expo by stockperformer.

Symbiostock stopped or went on hold, and then carried on the same; and oh I don't know anymore! I don't want to make any possibly damaging comments about something that is developing in the way that it is.

Microstockgroup 2013 annual survey results, looks like a fair bit of optimism and plenty of stability to me.

Shutterstock adding 200,000 images in a week via microstockgroup

Depositphotos shows us how syndication is great for making more sales but allows more people take a share of the pie... sometimes the lions share of it.

Shutterstock acquired webDAM cloud digital asset management platform

Picmac announced they were closing - amen to that

For latest updates check our facebook and twitter pages.

A somewhat brief article as unfortunately I have not left myself enough time to write a proper commentary on the subject: Microstock contributors are probably already aware of the thread at microstock group and 'movement' organized by boycottfotolia.org

The issue stems from photographer sentiment that devaluing of their work by Fotolias launch of 'dollar photo club' is something of a 'last straw' considering the license terms, image resolution etc provided. I can't really say I blame them considering Fotolias track record on transparency (or lack thereof).

Fotolia have now provided an opt-out from syndication of your Fotolia port on dollar photo club, 'DPC'. The option can be found by editing your profile on Fotolia and selecting the "contributor parameters" tab, there is a modify link next to "Sell my files on DPC".

I think that today (May 1st) should be a day for sending a signal of a mass opt-out rather than deleting portfolio or images. I know that opinion may undermine the pledge that some contributors made on the boycottfotolia site but I feel a middle ground has been reached (ideally it would be an opt-in). Overall it's up to each contributor to read all the information and make their own decisions where and where-not to sell.

For latest updates check our facebook and twitter pages.

It's been a good while since I shared any detailed analysis of my microstock earnings, there has been plenty going on over the past couple of years in changing royalties. Putting all the change, discussion, boycotts, rates and price structures to one side then probably the most important consideration for any photographer is what's happening to my revenue?

Agency Earnings Compared

Last time I shared a look at comparative revenue was back at the start of 2012, for the 12 months of Jan to Dec 2011, as an update I've looked at the 12 months to July 2015. A gap of 2.5 years, and a long time in microstock!

My earnings are up at almost all agencies, approximately 50% up on average, this despite me not uploading many images during the past 4 years (less than 15% portfolio increase). The main reason for the increase is an increase in revenue per sale i.e. prices to buyers are going up.

Shutterstock have taken out an astonishing lead, the graph below has it's Shutterstock bar chopped in half so that the rest of the graph is more readable - their bar is huge compared to the others, they bring me around 5x that of each of the next two agencies (canstock and istock) and are not too far from earning me the same as all the other agencies combined.

Earnings Comparison Graph: Since 2006 I have uploaded the same portfolio of images to all agencies, new agencies receive the back catalogue of images and are then included in all future uploads. (the only exceptions: photocase, alamy). Each agency has chosen to accept and reject whatever images they want - that's fine, they can curate their collections as they please I'm only interested in comparing aggregate earnings from image sales at each agency. You should group together agencies ranked below 15 as they would be prone to statistical error, earnings from those sites were very low.

Rankings Compared to 2011

There is a surprising amount of stability, notable exceptions being yaymicro disappearing out of the back door. Canstock continue to quietly climb their way up the table (quite a dark horse that agency) but climbing from 5 to 2 and overtaking istock, dreamstime and fotolia has been driven in most part by syndicated sales from fotosearch rather than direct sales on their own site. I'm opted-in to all syndication/reseller options and these earnings are included in the comparison (except for Fotolia and DCP where I was opted out).

Depositphotos is the highest climber, these figures are from before their recent pricing and royalty changes.

There is pretty clear evidence for me that we are not in a race to the bottom with prices to buyers. Prices for individual images are up quite sharply over the past 4 or so years (dollar photo club excepted), likewise the gap between agency revenue and contributor payout is also growing - agency keeps more, the photographer gets a smaller share.

Pricing Changes

In the past couple of years we have seen plenty of "price re-alignments". Flat rate pricing (istockphoto), new subscription offers with high resolutions for a fraction of the price of a buying the same images on a credit based process; new subscriptions that don't really lock the buyer in to anything! Because it’s a subscription payment the royalty can also be a suitable "fraction" to photographers, and for photographers that now rather withered and dried up carrot has been dangled out again: “there will be higher volumes of sales because….”.

Regardless of whether or not those agencies are cannibalising their own credit based purchases to sell a subscription to the same customer, all I see is somewhat less sales but much more revenue. This all seems counterintuitive but I've checked my numbers. Can my small portfolio of 'simple images' be so different from everyone else? Am I earning more at the expense of those whose photos had higher production values? Do images in older portfolios earn more? I don't think so.

Of course everyone's portfolio is different, but I'm not seeing any doom and gloom here. The doom and gloom comes from agency announcements and forums. Have we all become so negative when reading those announcements or is it just me looking at the world through cold blue coloured glasses?

The Obfuscated Royalty Rate Cuts

We've only seen direct royalty cuts from depositphotos in the past year, and that combined with an increase in price to the end user. Looking at their numbers it brings them more in line with the other agencies. DP have grown their market share, and their library to 30 million images, so the incentive of a higher rate for "new" photographers is no longer needed, likewise cheap prices to attract new buyers (a gamble perhaps)

Instead of direct cuts a new trend has emerged. Agencies now offer ‘new’ subscription systems and regular 'new' pricing schemes...streamlining and bringing us 'good news',  divide credits 5:1 and round up... some perversely describe this as simplification.

Like rationalisation is a euphemistic way of describing job-cuts, I think there is a risk that ‘simplification’ is becoming a synonym of royalty-cuts AND customer price increases. Seems that no agency dare mention cutting royalty rates directly, like everything political we have to go all-round-the-houses first.

We reached a spectacular low last July with depositphotos 3% royalty on a subscription sale (monthly subscription). A 'daily subscription' that offered 5 images a day over a month @ $79, with a high resolution pay-as-you go download on DP costing 10 credits, and each credit costing ~$1 (at the time) any customer downloading more than 8 high res images a month will be in the market to switch to a subscription, that's great for DP: those daily subscription sales results in at worst 56% payout to the contributors if all images are downloaded (rare!), the pay-as-you-go sales would mean a payout of 44%-60%. More likely the scenario that e.g. 23% of revenue paid out if half the allowance is used. DP later 'reconsidered' the offer.

It does seem that recent complaints and boycotts from the photographer community did have some effect, forcing agencies to provide opt-outs, and in some cases to send individual emails to ex-contributors incentivising them back after they deleted their portfolios or opted-out.

Pricing subscriptions is not easy. We know from Shutterstock who lose money if a subscriber downloads all images they could each day/month, buyers do not normally use up all of their entitlement in a subscription. Much fairer is iStocks minimum payout solution where photographers earn more if a buyer uses only use part of their entitlement. 

The details of how and in what way a subscription is offered is not what I have issue with here, it's the introduction of subscriptions and changes to them in an veiled attempt by some agencies to increase the numbers of download but keep more revenue for themselves. However If I'm earning more each month I'm not complaining, and that seems to be what's happening.

So what about DollarPhotoClub, Fotolia and Adobe

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, the launch of DollarPhotoClub (DPC) sounded like the end of the world to many contributors, but now the future for DPC looks bleak, the site is closed to new members. We can only speculate on the reasons:

• Not the business that Fotolias new owners Adobe want to be associated with?
• A model not compatible with attracting the best images to Fotolia and in turn to Adobe stock?
• A model that turned out to be a financial disaster or at not earning enough to stay viable long term?

We'll probably never know. I'm fairly sure the buyers that used it were pretty happy with the site. As an ex-subscriber myself (it was by far the best value way to buy photos!!!) I found it to be a well executed product, although the marketing and customer communication was (perhaps suitably so) somewhat trashy and overzealous.

The Bottom Line

Subscriptions seem to be the new way to obfuscate royalty rates by making it really hard to compare one agency to with another - it has the same effect for buyers. A subscription is a simple number of images provided in a fixed time for a fixed price, that bit is "simplification". Working out what will save buyers money or generate more revenue to photographers is much harder.

Despite changes to rates and sale prices here, there, and everywhere: my income is up and I'm off to upload some more photos ;)

Related Reading:

The istock shuffle: seanlockephotography.com/2014/09/02/istockphoto-shuffle

New istock offer: michaeljayfoto.com/agency-news/the-new-istock-offer

Lack of inspection spells doom microstockgroup.com/istockphoto-com/istocks-lack-of-inspection-standards-spell-more-doom

Changes at 123rf microstockgroup.com/123royaltyfree-com/royalties-on-%27download-pack%27-aren%27t-at-your-level (this thread really makes things much clearer..... ummm)

Envato lay the foundations to install smoke and mirrors in the future microstockgroup.com/photodune/a-more-balanced-envato-market/

Changes to prices at depositphotos microstockdiaries.com/depositphotos-raises-prices-and-lowers-royalties.html

For latest updates check our facebook and twitter pages.

At the end of last week Shutterstock announced it was about to change its royalty rates for Extended Licenses. You can read the details of the changes on microstockdiaries. Announcing the change would take place and then letting us wait a few days for the change to appear on the payouts page was uncharacteristically limp-wristed for Shutterstock.

Simplification to a Flawed Model

It's still beyond me how a flat rate is less simple than a series of payment tiers based on previous earnings (apart from an obvious attempt to sugar-coat the bad news). What is interesting is that it's a choice that places Shutterstock further into a tiered payment model that istock claimed was simply unsustainable when making major changes to the royalty structure back in 2010.

The change itself I don't see as that significant as it stands (I'm sure some of you will be upset, and I hear you all saying it's easy in your position with a small pay rise). But it's alarming when combined with the other little slices that Shutterstock have taken in the past couple of years, it seems pretty obvious there is more to come if a near 30% growth in revenue is to be maintained.

It was only a matter of time before the spotlight fell onto photographer royalties, we don't really know what happens inside the machine, we're just able to spot patterns in what we see on the outside. While wearing one of my other hats I earn money referring buyers to stock agencies like Shutterstock, some of the changes that spring to mind are related to referrals not directly to photographers or buyers:

Cuts to Photographer Referral Lifetime (shutterstock forum, Feb 2013)

Reduction in entry standards (to the presumable end of improving the "number of images" or some other metric)

I'm also watching buyer referral payouts dwindle:

I'm not too sure what to make of it. Shutterstock was once a strong earner for me, last years results were less than pleasing (to the point of my now sending buyers to depositphotos).

[Background on the graph above: traffic, page views, visitor sources, etc at the website these stats relate to were level across the year, nothing changed in layout of the site or traffic from search etc. Other than site visitors potentially being 'saturated' with Shutterstock subscriptions, I really don't know what's happening here, and I'm interested to hear from anyone else working in the market.]

For what is worth, my income as a photographer is going up (or at the very least standing still when viewed pro-rata with images I'm adding to my portfolio, considering the growth of the image collection at Shutterstock that can't be ignored as a counterpoint to this.

Is the Shutterstock Bubble about to Burst?

The alarming paragraph title is perhaps not so warranted, we have been there before with iStock; it took several years for the 'clear market leader' to lose their shine, there probably won't be a burst. We should also note that iStock also made numerous business decisions I felt to be "completely surreal" before it became noticeable that they had lost so much ground the downturn was irrevocable. Shutterstock not made such dreadful choices so far (you might argue this is one), but they are definitely now heading down a similar path. That path might have been inevitable from the day they floated.

Minimum Viable Payout Rate

The big question for Shutterstock is how to find that payout rate. Cut the rate too much and contributors will leave, make it too high and the shareholders will want blood. Leaving it alone is also a cut in real terms.

As contributors in mainstream microstock we have little choice at all in the matter, but to get paid the market rate or leave it. That rate is complex, it's spread across multiple agencies and is dependent on the success of that agency, minimum quality of content buyers expect and more.

Like paying an employee the right salary, the choice can't be simply made by reducing until the employee leaves: they might not be happy to come back when offered a tiny bit more than what they felt was not enough.

With the recent Getty / Corbis collection deal, Fotolia + Adobe + Subscription in the Creative cloud, and several convincing looking start-ups vying to take their own little slice of subscriptions market, the future looks decidedly "dynamic".

For latest updates check our facebook and twitter pages.

If you're an istock contributor you will already be aware of the new Getty images "ESP" submission platform coming soon and the closure of the existing submission system at istockphoto (aka "xnet"). Somewhat annoyingly the powers that be have decided not to migrate data from the old platform; said platform has been somewhat hobbled for the past couple of months anyway, but now is an excellent time to take a look at the stats over the years before they're gone for good!

I started uploading to iStockphoto in 2003. A lot has changed - I’m not even 100% certain I wasn't still on dial up in the UK, if not I was certainly on my first cable modem with 600Kbits/s symmetric (and wow did I think that was the dogs dangalies back then...)

Uploads over the years - growing portfolio

Total is cumulative and the upper line (sorry about the colours here). This graph is mostly for reference and useful when looking at the next graphs. There's not really much to say here, I’ve been adding images at a sporadic but linear-ish rate (I did upload more than average in 2016).

Downloads (sales)

Before 2009 "file downloads" were all there was. Since then we can see individual file sales decreasing, made up for in volume by sales from partner program and subscriptions

Revenue (Total Royalties)

Overall, averaged out over the years revenue is on the way up. I'd hope so considering I'm uploading more images! More images in the portfolio means we need to look at RPI...

Revenue Per Image

RPI is going down, but not as much as I was expecting, nonetheless it's approx. half to 1/3 of what it was for 2009 and before.

But, there is a big problem with looking at RPI, especially over long time frames, it's capable of being diluted by old images in my portfolio. I don't curate my portfolio once uploaded (to make the playing field level for all agencies to compare).

I don't have an easy way of calculating RPI for a rolling window of images uploaded in the previous 3 or 5 years, I think that might be a more useful statistic and less prone to error.

Hopefully there is something here to compare your own results with. Certainly not as gloomy as I thought things might have been; especially industry wide considering how much ground istock have lost to shutterstock.

Notes:

1. For clarity ELs not included in the graphs.
2. If you are playing along at home with your own stats, as of 2011 the stats show deactivations as negative numbers, they were positive numbers before that, I’ve taken absolute values of all years (and yes I would like a vodka please).
3. 2003 was 5 months of a year and hence is "statistically flawed"
4. Results for December 2016 are missing and hence values will be approx. 1/12th higher than shown - December in my portfolio is more or less on par with other average months. Sep-Nov are good months for me as is commonly seen in the industry. I think this is actually quite important as it could make the RPI at istock constant over the past 3 years.
    

For latest updates check our facebook and twitter pages.

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.

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.