Yaymicro have announced that Yuri Arcurs has joined as a contributing photographer, some of his images can be seen here. Yuri is one of the leading microstock photographers and his joining yaymicro is a signal to other contributors.

istockphoto have launched a new premium collection called 'vetta'. Images have been specially selected from uploads submitted by istock exclusive photographers (previously known as the premier collection). The launch of the new collection has coincided with updates to the agencies search engine. Press Release

Both Mostphotos and Featurepics have announced they are developing improvements to their sites and asked their contributors for feedback.

Stockxpert contributors will no longer have the option of selling their images via photos.com following the announcement that photos.com will drop stockxpert in favour of selling images sourced from istockphoto. Last months announcement by istockphoto that it would be reselling images via the former Jupiter sites (incl photos.com) caused concerns that duplicates would be found if the same image had been uploaded to both istock and stockxpert. All the agencies involved are part of Getty images.

Shutterstock generated one of the biggest storms we've see so far in the ranks of microstock contributors when they announced that all non U.S. contributors would need to complete American IRS forms or have up to 30% of their earnings withheld from photos downloaded by non-U.S. image buyers. At last count there were 83 pages(!) of comments on their forum. A further announcement advised contributors to await further instructions on progressing the applications. Regarding the 'forum storm', to paraphrase what I wrote in microstock tantrums, "think carefully before going off like frog in a sock".

Fotolia have announced the launch of photoxpress.com, a site which offers free stock images via the fotolia free API. fotolia members have been adding images to the 'free collection' for several years by opting in if their images do not meet the standards of the main collection. Photoxpress currently offers almost 350,000 images.

Canstockphoto.com have announced that they now accept stock video footage. This follows last weeks news from fotolia that their video collection is now live after several months of accepting new footage uploads.

Unlike fotolia who had to grow a collection of clips before launch, new videos uploaded to canstock will be available for immediate download and sold alongside a growing collection of 80,000 video clips on fotosearch.

As a photographer you have probably come across the term geotagging before now, a way to describe the location a photo was taken in metadata embedded within an image file. This geo tagging can be done in camera (some cameras contain a GPS), with a companion device (a geotagger) that tracks your location as you take photos and synchronises later, or manually with software (just like when you embed titles, descriptions and keywords).

It's an incredible number to reach, and it's important to highlight that they are not all licensed for free use in commercial work, nor are they all of suitable resolution to use as stock images. Looking at flickr creative commons I can see that around 17.5 million images have a licence that would let anyone use them as stock (with attribution of course), the remainder have non-commercial licenses.

So what did March 2009 bring to the world of microstocki photography:

Yaymicro anounced a 25% increase in sales during February compared to previous months. The also appointed themselves a new CTO, Oddbjorn Sjogren.

Shutterstock reached 6 million images (actually this was in late February) less than 4 months after announcing they reached 5 million, I've almost given up posting individual articles when the big agencies reach a million mark... until 10 million comes! Shutterstock's Jon Oringer stated that this was "Thanks to more than 144,000 submitters who continue to contribute to our library".

Cutcaster launched support for corporate buyer accounts.

Crisis? What Crisis?

It seems to me that the Global Economic Crisis is not having a huge effect on micro stock. At least that's what I see in my earnings which are relatively stable. There are several factors affecting the microstocki industry at the moment, but at least one of them I think is positive. Although microstock is changing at an increasing pace, it seems to be quite stable compared to the rest of the stock industry which is, at least from the press stories, exploding, crashing and generally turning upside down.

Lookstat is a service that allows you to track sales of your microstocki images across several websites.

Tracking your sales statistics is important, seeing what's selling and what's not selling is vital to success in microstock unless you enjoy spending time keywording, sorting and uploading images that earn less money than they cost to produce. You could track sales from each site you use yourself but it's difficult to compare how each image or collection of images are selling across all the sites you use. Some microstock contributors use spreadsheets to manually tabulate their sales each month.

The lookstat site currently tracks and correlates your sales data from three microstock agencies:

• istockphoto
• dreamstime
• shutterstock

With Chris Anderson's new book "Free" in the pipeline and comments I heard at UGCX like "What about creative commons, it's the elephant in the room everyone is ignoring", there is a lot of interest and perhaps concern about how low exactly the price of some stock images will go. Will the price to the end user of 'ordinary stock images' be driven to zero in the same way as other digital assets and services such as digital music, on-line email, holiday bookings etc.

I think that in a few years time with market saturation of 'ordinary images' as it is, then we will see a fair amount of this type of work being made available for free. I'm not taking about the style of image that sells for 100's as macrostock, but the very easy to shoot, low set-up cost that is the staple of microstock. What would happen to the market if the best 30% of the images that one of the largest agencies rejected were set free on the internet? That would perhaps, be a million quite usable stock images most of them with only very minor defects.

Fotolia have announced a new commission structure including a new option for exclusive photographers in addition to the current options for exclusive images and non-exclusive images.

On Wednesday 7th Jan istockphoto will launch their new price structure for 2009 (which means a pay rise for istock contributors). Details of the new pricing can be found at istockphoto 2009 prices.

Was it just me that found in 2008 that Christmas didn't start in the shops quite so early? (like September or October!), did the public backlash at being told Christmas is only two months away finally kick in? or does the speed at which things can be done these days make it pointless to prepare for an special event like Christmas more than a month in advance?

Blogging - Is it worth doing? From general comments I have heard across the photography community then the answer is mostly yes! Do it. One thing is for certain, if a photographer is known to have a blog then few people think that's a bad thing.

Even if a blog or photoblog is not up to the standard of your usual work it is often seen as a sandbox for experiments or a place to bounce creative ideas off the wider photo community. Blogging on a photography or microstocki related topic is a great way to 'learn though teaching'.

Fotolia, again(!), have played the "Lets change to rules on the Quiet" game by increasing the number of images you need to sell to to earn a higher commission. It's understood that those who have already reach a 'ranking' tier will retain that rank even if the number of sales needed has increased above the number of sales they have made. A table of the new tier vales can be seen below along with the old values on the right.

Following an acquisition, Canstockphoto.com images will be made available via Fotosearch.

"Introduction of Can Stock Photo content will begin on the Brazilian and Japanese sites, www.fotosearch.com.br and www.fotosearch.jp, with more sites to follow. Once the content is fully rolled-out, Can Stock Photo contributors will be exposed to millions of Fotosearch visitors every week. Through Fotosearch, contributors will be able to sell images as prints".

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