MicrostockInsider - A guide to selling stock photography on microstock websites

Keep track of your earnings - MicrostockCharts.com

Steve Gibson — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 08:29:50 +0000

MicrostockDiaries recently announced the launch of MicrostockCharts.com. It's a service that allows microstock photographers to record and plot graphs of their earnings. I guess the best way to learn about it is to read the full post on microstockdaires.

At the moment microstockcharts is simply a way for you to manually enter your monthly earnings, portfolio size and number of downloads etc. then plot graphs of RPI earnings and downloads. There is an option to make your charts public if you want to share them e.g. posting a link to your sales history on a forum.

What lies ahead is the most exciting part of microstockcharts: Benchmarking or comparison against the average sales of other microstock charts users. These features are currently in development so details are to be finalised.

The range of sales from month to month that we see even on medium sized portfolios is so large that doing any kind of tending comparison is very difficult. A good example of this was when all the stockxpert advertising was removed from sxc and replaced with istockphoto advertising; I wanted to see if my stats reflected the change, i.e. drop in sales at stockxpert and increase at istockphoto - If there was a change then I could not see it. Any change had been swamped in the normal variation from month to month, sometimes as much as 40% changes between good and bad months, less if I exclude extended licenses.

There are also plans to make it easier to import data into microstockcharts, without needing to disclose your agency login details.

I plan to enter my data into microstockcharts and share it. I've been, well I guess lazy in the past when it comes to sharing my sales - a large part of that is the time it takes to record and format this data into graphs. On their own, results from an individual month mean very little, only when plotted over a few months do you get a fairer picture of average sales and then become able to calculate a more realistic RPI etc.

I have written a slightly more in-depth review of the service, which I plan to keep up-to-date as new features are added.

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February Microstock News

Steve Gibson — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 23:54:45 +0000

Quite a month compared to January:

As previously posted, Getty launched their new subscription site thinkstock and closed stockxpert.

Shutterstock reached 10 million images, at this rate that's going to double to 20 million images in less than 2 years.

Also this Month:

Fotolia officially announced the launch of the Microstock Photo Plugin for WordPress. Bloggers can download the plugin to simplify the process of buying and inserting fotolia images into their blog posts. New fotolia users can receive 5 free credits when they register, bloggers can also optionally earn affiliate revenue when a visitor buys an image from fotolia after clicking on it in their blog.

Isyndica announced a range of updates including a spell checker, support for moneybookers, alamy and discounted yearly subscriptions. The updates also included a "leaderboard" which compares your best selling agencies to those across the rest of the isyndica users. Right now my istock sales look a little atypical!

lookstat published a useful microstock guide, written as an introduction to microstock for RF (macro) and RM photographers. It includes some statistics, advice and checklists that are still useful for microstock photographers who already know the ropes.

shutterstock launched a "facebook connect' app to provide a service similar to their shuttertweet feature. As a bonus you also earn an affiliate royalty on sales made of your images if people buy them after seeing them in your feed. If you want to announce your sales and uploads to your facebook friends there are instructions on your shutterstock account page.

fotolia also launched flixtime.com a service similar to animoto.com that allows you to upload your own photos and videos to create a dynamic video presentation, users of flixtime can also choose free stock images from a media lounge and also sign-up to fotolia to obtain three free photos from the fotolia collection and discounts on future purchases.

Deposit photos started a free trial subscription where (potential) buyers can download up to 140 images free of charge. Photographers are paid for each download as though the images were being charged for. I also had my first sale at deposit photos - still early days there...

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10 Million Images, 125 Million Downloads

Steve Gibson — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 23:08:10 +0000

A couple of days ago the counter at the top of the shutterstock website ticked over to 10,000,000 images - well actually that could be better described as "shot past 10 million at an astonishing rate". There are currently about 100k new images accepted each week. Only about 40% of uploads are high enough quality to pass shutterstock review process.

The milestone image was uploaded by Canadian photographer Matthew Jacques and can be seen here.

Matthew has been a Shutterstock submitter since 2006. He started taking pictures as a hobby, and recently used his Shutterstock earnings to invest in a professional-quality DSLR camera and has branched out to shoot motor sports, weddings and portraits. “My hobby’s paying for itself” he says.

125 Million Downloads

The really interesting thing in the press release was that for the first time shutterstock have announced the number of images that have been downloaded in total: more than 125 Million downloads since 2003. Making an 'average of 12.5 downloads per image' - on it's own that's a misleading calculation considering the range of abilities of photographers working in microstock and the varying ages of images on the site. None the less, sharing this and their average acceptance rate is very useful, it makes shutterstock a yardstick to measure other agencies against. Unfortunately not all agencies are quite so open minded when it comes to sharing such info.

Read more about shutterstock in our review

Visit the shutterstock photographer pages

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Thinkstock Opens - Stockxpert Closes

Steve Gibson — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 22:44:04 +0000

After yesterday unveiling thinkstockphotos (announced late last year as the 'new Getty subscription site') Getty have announced that Stockxpert will close with almost immediate effect.

Stockxpert Buyers

Credits are no longer being sold on stockxpert, nor can new buyers register. Those with existing credits on SXP can transfer them on a 1:1 basis for credits on istockphoto.

1/5 of Images Transferred

Contributors that had opted into reselling images by subscription at SXP have had many of their images transferred to thinkstock. 365 of the 409 Images I had on SXP have been transferred, perhaps I should rephrase that as "are now available via" thinkstock. For the immediate future contributors still log into SXP to access their earnings, stats and control their images. It looks like not all my 409 images are available purely because I have some identical photos on istockphoto also available via thinkstock and these duplicates have been filtered out.

On thinkstock content sourced from stockxpert is now part of the "Hemera" collection, and while I'm not sure that this is exclusively the images from SXP a comparison on search results from this collection and identical terms on SXP gave me the figure of just over 20% as stated above. Possible this figure will climb as those who have not opted into the subscription sales on SXP change their mind; but noted that there was some strong resistance to the price point that Getty was offering contributors of just US $0.25 per download.

It was coming for a long time

There had been lots of rumours and comments following the acquisition of Jupiterimages by Getty that Stockxpert was doomed. Then following the August news that all advertising on stockxperts parent site stockxchng was to be redirected to istockphoto the outlook did not look good. The ending of photos.com sales (again replaced by istock) and a few other issues like broken links on the site meant that the signs were all there. My inbox at stockxpert marks out the time-line.

All that said, I for one was not expecting this news, but we could all tell something big was happening. With rumours that stockxpert were implementing Gettys controlled vocabulary I was, perhaps naively, in the camp that thought a big transformation about to happen. Indeed it has, but closure was not the transformation I was quite expecting. The future of the collection currently housed at SXP is a little hazy to me. With no way to upload new images it looks like we are just 'cashing in' on this collection before it ages.

What's wrong with just having photos.com?

well I guess it's branding, that's just another sign microstock is now completely mainstream:

photos.com (plus) is a website that offers subscription stock images at $249.95 a month
vs.
thinkstock is a brand that offers subscription stock images at $249.00 a month

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Veer Made Simple

Steve Gibson — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 02:09:50 +0000

Veer have announced some exciting plans to integrate their marketplace microstock collection with the rest of their website making the marketplace "front and center" in their search results. Veer marketplace currently resides in a separate tab on veer.com, and results are displayed in a separate sidebar along with the main search.

The changes (planned for Q2) will include a new interface and also see the removal of veers Rights Managed collection to a new site (yet to be announced) which will target "more traditional and sophisticated customers".

Veer also promise to "substantially increase our marketing activities to spread the word about our simple web site and affordable offering to a much bigger audience" once the changes have been implemented.

more on this story on the BJP website "Corbis is betting on microstock and royalty-free images as it plans to adapt it's Veer offering by dropping rights-managed".

Other January News

Well, not much! the amicable closure of zymmetrical just missed out on Decembers news post.

Bigstockphoto have added a feature which helps warn contributors automatically that their keywords match those of protected designs and intellectual property, there is a useful list of these keywords here

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Looking Back, Looking Forward

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

Less than a week in yet that hang-over seems so long ago! I submitted 170 images last year, that's nothing like the number I was planning 12 months ago, that's despite upload being easier than ever. Thinking back 12 months and things felt very different, as I'm sure they will in 12 months time. Good news being that my earnings are up.

Looking Back - A 2009 Retrospective

February saw a trip to San Jose for UGCX where I had the opportunity to meet with fellow photographers, bloggers and big wigs from the stock photo world - in fact much 'bigger wings' that I imagined meeting. The whole thing gave me a much broader perspective on the industry, if you think microstock seems to be constantly changing and morphing you "ain't seen nothin". That said I can't quite get away from thinking about the "Random organizational changes" Scott Adams wrote about in as "management time fillers" in the Dilbert principle book. But what do I know!?

Veer arrived and caused a stir, with their, at the time "incredible shock! horror!" news that they would be mixing full price and micro on one website. 10 months later It just seems like a natural thing to provide clients with a range of images from various sources, some budget and some premium.

Shutterstock bought out bigstockphoto allowing them to take a part of the pay-as-you-go market while also concentrating on their core subscription business.

Probably the biggest change of the year from the contributors point of view was the launch of isyndica - that day uploading got a lot easier. In making the whole process easier for everyone we all face an even more difficult job getting our images accepted. While your workflow is still critical for success the focus of microstock is moving even more towards great photos (which it should) and not being an issue of overcoming technical problems like post processing and uploading. Lookstat also launched their paid services for processing keywording and submitting images, aimed at stock imaging professionals it caters for photographers who "only take photos" leaving them to do what they do best, in some respects combining lookstat and the agencies mirrors the process of traditional stock.

12 months ago the big agencies had about 5 million images each - right now they are hurtling towards 8 million, and shutterstock leading with 9,480,272 as I write this. 10 million is coming very soon with well over 1/4 million new images a month.

An old friend brings comfort in times of change

Towards the end of the last year we revisited the "microstock in evil" thread in the blogosphere (how 'last decade' does blogosphere sound!), this time extended into to the whole of stock photography being evil, some quite amusing posts were tabled:

stock photography is a gold rush, ("The only people who profit are those selling the tools", kind of ironic considering the website that's published on) If microstock is a gold rush then it's been rushing quite nicely for at least 5 years.

we're a bunch of monkeys in a post riddled with factual error and assumptions based on thin evidence. Tyler at MSG made rather a nice rebuttal to that "story".

...oh and that bloody jar of coins, again the irony is not lost on me when considering the subject of the Time magazine cover story and the expectation that someone deserves 3k for such a photo.

and after the smoke has cleared your welcome to slit your wrists and end it all because we're all just wasting our time. (Sadly there is an air of truth to thoughts of a bohemian, in that while microstock quality goes up and up, the photos in print media which were always exceptional/thought provoking/cleverly chosen are now starting to look like something just pasted in to fill the space.)

and finally my favourite: a parallel between microstock and China's environmental policy.

I'm not blinkered to these stories, I do think some big change is happend and more on it's way for microstock and stock photography in general, these days change is ALWAYS on it's way. Microstock is still seen by some as the cuckoo in the nest throwing out the traditional business, but melodramatic as it might sound I think it's more the meteorite and dinosaurs.

I think these stories and arguments will go on forever: we work in an industry that at one end has amateurs who consider the cost of shooting an image to be zero, and at the other end professionals who are acutely aware "that time is money". Just because digital photos don't have physical processing costs does not mean that they are free! Microstock needs both, without the amateurs it will grow up into a tunnel-minded industry obsessed with churning out clone images just like the ones that already sell. No offence intended to those out there who create new and creative material each time they shoot.

Word(s) of the Year

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

Looking Forward, Plans and the Future

Looking forward to 2010 leads me to wonder can amateurs still sell their work at microstock? Of course I already know the answer to that: yes, absolutely, it's the amateurs that defined microstock, they are a vital part. Look at Getty trawling flickr to get 'natural style stock'... Sometimes looking at acceptance rates and comments from noobs I'm not quite so sure it's that easy.

I think making assumptions based on 'handed down' knowledge were the biggest things that I have learnt in 2009, in that they are not always correct. Lots of nice copyspace and the experience of thumbnail readability are one where I think microstock breaks a lot of expectations - we all 'know' that designers love copyspace, but they don't seem to buy it. I repeatedly hear that designers also hate contrasty images and over saturated colours, yet many of the microstock sellers seem to be just that (fine for web but not that good for print perhaps). There are no hard and fast rules here but I just get the feeling that a lot of things that I have learnt from other people and seen first-hand in the past 10 years are not quite as set in stone as I thought they were.

'Free' and Creative Commons, more important than ever.

I could sit here and make all sorts of new year resolutions about uploading more this year; one thing that is for sure is that I should probably be getting that next batch ready instead of typing this.

So stop reading and go start taking photos and selling them; finally, if a little belated, all the best for 2010 from microstockinsider.

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December News Digest

Steve Gibson — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 09:05:58 +0000

Slightly longer than usual since my last news digest - it's slow on news over the holidays...

Fotolia launched a 'tax centre' in their account control panel, all contributors are required to complete tax forms before payments are made. This practice is in line with shutterstock and veer. For individuals in many countries it's a reasonably simple process of reading some documentation and filling out a form online. Contributors have until January 1 2010 to complete their forms.

Veer introduced 10,000 USD customer protection to images purchased in their marketplace.

Panthermedia reduced their prices more inline with the rest of the microstock industry. It appears that midstock prices did not work for them(?), the licensing options have also been streamlined which is a good good thing, as they're still not exactly straight forward (that is not uncommon on sites with subscriptions, credit options and multiple licenses to understand).

imagecatalog quietly passed away in late November, unloved and unnoticed by most.

istock announced (in a well worded release) their 2010 pricing, some significant changes to prices for exclusive photographers images and their vetta collection, plus a changes to their canister levels for contributors. The only thing I object is Kelly's comment that "Exclusive collection is built on rich, unique imagery unlike anything else out there". Istock certainly have something good in their exclusive contributor base and exclusive collection, and yes those images are unique (you can't buy them elsewhere), but a quick look through recent istock exclusive uploads reveals some very ordinary images from their exclusives (and some good ones), a good proportion of those exclusive images are very much "like anything else out there". The doubling of prices of exclusive images is probably a good idea, so long as new the search is implemented well. When vetta launched all vetta images appeared first in the search results completely eclipsing the lower priced images, the "problem" with best match was soon corrected to show a better mix of images. Istock have every right to bias search results towards exclusive images so long as the lower quality exclusive images (there are plenty of them!) don't come ahead of higher quality images or better matches from a non-exclusive contributors, If they do impatient buyers may go elsewhere.

Dreamstime also announced their 'pay rise' by announcing their 2010 payment schedule, c/w a comparison of last years prices (thank you DT). More credits per download for most image sizes and easier to attain level 5 images (50 DL instead of 100 DL).

Fotoila snuck in a change to their 24 months unsold images for 50 cents program, these images are now locked into their free API for 5 years instead of the previous 18 months. Tact? More Gordon Brown than Barack Obama I think... comments on MSG. FT also more publicly announced in a newsletter that new buyers, contributor earnings, credit purchases and photographer payouts were all up by around 50% on 2008 levels, API calls were up 203% (API calls are 3rd party websites and software reselling or searching for licensable images).

Fotolia also cut commission to their contributors by up to 5% (read on it's not all bad news). Exclusive photographers also took athe same cut and still receive17% more than non-exclusives (in addition to higher sale price per image). Royalties now increase by 3% per fotolia rank i.e. non exclusives now receive 28% after 100 downloads 31% after 1000 instead of the previous 34%, 34% and upwards. This will benefit their well established photographers and penalise the majority of hobbyists. It's not all bad news as prices have increased (basic images are now $1,3,5 (Xsmall, Small, Medium) instead of the previous $1,2,4 dollars, so all but the smallest images you should see more income.

Clustershot announced that they have partnered with tineye to have all their images indexed. This brings the potential for people seeing your images elsewhere online to search for a place to license them.

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Comparison of Popular Search Keywords

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

A couple of days ago there was a post on the lookstat blog titled top search keywords for energy, it compared search terms in Google in an attempt to estimate popularity of energy images on microstock sites. Earlier this year I did something similar in a post about seasonal stock images, and at the time I made the point that I wasn't exactly sure how well Google search terms related to searches on microstock sites.

So that set me thinking... (yes, be very afraid) Just exactly how much of a match is google trends/adwords data to what people are searching for at microstock sites? Clearly there will be some relationship, but I'd also guess that there are lots of popular terms that will not have a proportionate number of microstock searches. It's difficult to know how similar the two are. Is it reasonable to assume that popular keywords in Google are more likely to lead to more microstock sales as those keywords make popular subjects hence there will be related businesses in need of such images? As they say "assume makes an ass out of u and me".

Say for example we see that holiday flights is a popular subject in google, we also see that exchange rates is equally popular, for me it's a stretch to say that images representing exchange rates will sell in the same proportions as ones depicting holiday flights, surely there are too many variables?

Another Data Set

I have access to the keywords that people used while browsing a free stock photo site (similar stockxchange but nothing like as big). Of about 1 million searches in 2008 and late 2007 there were some 160,000 unique key phrases searched. The vast majority of them only got one search (just 48k with 2 searches or more). This is just one of the places in microstock we see the 'long tail / exponential decay graph', see my post how long images continue to sell and more recently microstock dairies revisited the longtail. A plot of the top 100 is as follows: full table of the data is below, only every 4th keyword would fit on the graph:

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

The keyphrases were sorted as is, so typos, stemming and things like entering the search "cat." or "cats" have not been grouped along with all the other "cat" searches. Likewise the total for "people" does not include a total of times users searched for terms with people in them like "young people" these are listed separately.

Comparison

Armed with this data (in the slowest pivot table known to man) I decided to do a bit of analysis to see how these matched the results in the lookstat post:

Left: Google search analysis from the lookstat post and Right: results from the free stock photo site data set.

Looks like they match quite well! Anything below 10 could perhaps be considered error and could easily be skewed by some other factor. I was convinced I was going to be able to prove that energy jobs was popular in Google but not a popular stock search, it seems that way but sadly I don't think I have a large enough data set to be certain (?).

What's quite interesting is that only 45 out of a million searches were made for our 'top' energy keywords (there were also 6 similar with one search each - "solar energy farm", "solar energy panel" etc) plus many more for single keywords of solar, energy and their related synonyms).

The Top 100

For extra comparison, the keywords in my data set look a lot like those top 100 keywords searched on Shutterstock, although I have a definite English language bias, I also have not removed from the top 100 several keywords like 'nude' and 'sex' that are probably not image buyers. Quite a lot more variability in the ordering and plenty of the keywords Shutterstock have in their top 100 only made it into my top 200.

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

Note: "blank" searches are probably either robots, perhaps mistaken users, or users just seeing what an empty search does. Interesting if you run a web site with a photo search then a blank search should most likely not allow you to search, or perhaps return a message with nothing found but ALSO a selection of random or popular images.

Ranked 95 to 99 "chocolate, beer, tv and space cake", sounds like a good night in, lol.

Unlucky for some

Heres a few of the 406 terms that had 13 searches each:

baby jesus, voucher, pylon, weed, quebec, ladders, computer chip, emo girl, brussel sprouts, learner driver, woman on phone, lord of the rings, lotto, turf, fashion clothes, sand clock, ghandi, abba, herron, synergy, tofu, hunk, paper plane, miami beach, nylon, andy warhol

Quite an eclectic little bunch and I think this is the first time synergy, tofu and andy warhol have been used in the same sentence. Quite a few of the searches are not what you would call 'traditional stock subjects'.

Conclusion

It seems reasonable that a comparison of relative terms in google trends/adwords will match the relationships between searches on a stock photo site, but I still think that there are a lot of keyphrases for which that is also not the case. I plan to analyse the data some more to see if I can pick out a few obvious "search engine popular" keywords that don't match image searches. it would be really great if google would let us search their "image search" volume alone. I did previously look at using the google data by combining keywords of interest with the keyword "photos", "images" or "pictures", it works for very popular single word searches but not for most key phrases. We have thus far ignored which images actually sell! see picniche for more about that.

I should be able to set-up something were you can query this data and my more recent 2009 dataset, if anyone is interested?

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Pixmac now reselling Dreamstime images

Steve Gibson — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 08:25:14 +0000

Microstock agency Pixmac have announced that they are now reselling Dreamstime images and have added a new 'luxury' collection of macrostock priced content from image source. This in addition to their own microstock collection, celebrity images and reselling of images from Fotolia.

The site now features a series of tabs that allows buyers to easily select from the various collections.

Being able to buy images from two of the biggest microstock agencies in one place is by far the most interesting news here. I know from my own limited experience in buying that I sometimes have to visit several microstock agencies to find the right image and in some cases then go to alamy if desperate... Most buyers don't know or don't care where the images came from, what matters is that for their search terms they find a result and from there it's easy to pay and download the image; this is especially true for microstock buyers many of whom have never bought a stock photo before or do so quite infrequently.

The new 'luxury' collection is not another premium microstock, it offers access to a macrostock priced collection of 100,000 images from one agency, but conceivably could be used to resell a wider range of macrostock content. We can contrast this with veer offering microstock images to their existing macrostock client base.

We don't yet know how many Dreamstime images are available from Pixmac, as with Fotolia I expect the number to grow over the next few months, it took many months for 'several million' FT images to be included.

The History

I'd be the first to say I was not always a fan of pixmac, by their own admission they launched too early before everything was quite ready and in doing so caused some confusion and upset to parts of the (easily upset?) microstock contributor community. Over the past 12 months they have been continually improving their site and their marketing, a pixmac blog post from August outlines some of the improvements and answers photographers concerns.

Pixmac have introduced several features to make them stand out from the start-up crowd, the ability to buy an image in three minutes without need to register being I think one of the biggest innovations. Time and again in e-commerce we learn that the easier it is to buy the more sales are made - signing up for an account, confirming emails, in some cases adding the image again to a basket then going through payment to finally download is something that microstock could get away with because of the dangled carrot of a cheap image. Now that lots of agencies offer similar prices, and often the same images, the differentiator is search and ease of use. Pixmac offer the price concious a credit based option, and those a hurry the ability to solve their image needs without questions like "how many credits would you like to buy".

Is this the Future?

Future of buying any image conveniently from just one location might be many years away in a seemingly utopian internet of semantic tagged self organising photos, this is clearly only a tiny step there. There is currently no standardisation in the APIs used to resell stock photos, and despite how modern and great we might all think IPTC data and controlled vocabulary's are, searching images with words is still incredibly difficult in a world where search engines simply scan page titles and the 'words located somewhere around an image'. Yes there are various services that search several microstock agencies like cyclo.ps and the picniche search bar but they hardly make the buying process more convenient, you still need accounts at each of the agencies.

Having everything in one place has lots of advantages but also some disadvantages and so still leaves plenty of marketplace for niche agencies and (something I've been waiting to see for some time) niche collections of pre-selected images sourced from one or more microstock agencies then sold via a specially targeted conduit (that conduit being a niche website, or built into an application).

The Effect

Microstock is nothing without the buyers and nothing without the photographers or artists who contribute. For me and a lot of other photographers pixmac asks questions none of which this announcement answers, in fact with my images already on dreamstime and fotolia do I even continue to upload? For the present, yes, submission is easy; I can make a larger cut of the sale if my image is sold direct from pixmac and any that are sourced from FT and DT are icing on the cake at those agencies. Sales for me are still slow and I'll continue monitoring my pixmac sales - I currently only have 125 images with them so at present the Jury is out.

From the buyers aspect this is great news, a single site that offers coverage of two of the biggest agencies in one place, a taste of macrostock if you want to get something special and the bold move of including a free images tab along side the paid photos I think will work well at attracting new customers and making the 'one stop shop' effect even more complete.

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Measuring My Self Promotion Results

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

Coinciding with iSyndica's announcement of the official launch of their 'promotion service' I thought it was time to share a few preliminary results of my investigation into promotion with 'free stock photos'. Even before I wrote the article microstock photos for free I've had been redistributing some of my images for free on various websites with somewhat inconclusive results.

The following table shows the sites I have uploaded images to, the number of images, image views recorded by those sites and the number of times someone clicked a link to my website. Measurements for the first 4 weeks of September 2009.

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

Caveats and Notes:

Results of click throughs were collected using web server stats, and in some cases where zero results were seen I confirmed this against google analytics.

The same images were not added to each site (making this a less than fair comparison), some of the sites contained stock images, some contain travel photography and some more creative/abstract work or my personal images.

On almost all of these websites the images are provided in return for a link attribution, traffic generated from these links is difficult to attribute to just one source, but this link-back forms the primary rational for 'giving the images away'; this very important factor is not included in the table.

The results to not show the 'branding impact' generated, even if viewers did not click they probably saw my name or pseudonym, perhaps even the url of my website. Like other forms of advertising these 'sightings' can help you get noticed in ways that are very hard to measure, e.g. the next time that person visits a microstock site they are more likely to notice my name or brand as familiar. Unfortunately for me there are a few photographers called Stephen Gibson, even one sharing the same middle initial... so choose your login / profile name carefully when you are setting up accounts on social media and sharing sites.

In some cases I was able include a non hyperlinked url in the image description, (on sites where I could not include a link in my profile), these are noted and will have skewed results.

Depending on the site, having a link back to your own website / portfolio can be an SEO thumbs up in a search engine even if you don't see many visitors (this depends on the link having a suitable title and not having a nofollow tag).

Current Conclusion

Well I didn't expect a lot of clicks but I did expect to measure more than four!! I thought at first it was somehow to do with nofollow links not being tracked by stats software, but I can see clicks coming in from comments I've made on blogs so that appears to rule that out. I was hoping for these results to show a little more than this, helping to quantify which sites were more useful, clearly I'm measuring the wrong parameters here!

The above table leaves me with nothing but the question "how do we measure the impact of our branding" it appears not to be by looking at clicks! I'm certain that people have visited some of my sites after seeing images shared on the websites above, but without better measurement these results leave me unable to devote more than an hour or so each month to such 'photo sharing promotional activities'. In the case of flickr I will still contribute as I find it a useful community, but the other sites will have to lay dormant.

Has anyone else seen results from their image uploads that can be directly measured? I'm the first to admit that none of my flickr accounts could be described as popular although they do receive a quite pleasing number of views.

I know that this style of promotion is working to some degree, I have one web domain with no content which receives a steady stream of 'Direct address / Bookmark / Link in email' (i.e. the url was typed or the browser did not disclose the referring page). That domain has never had anything more than a holding page on it - I think that's purely off the back of the fact that the domain matches the username (with .com added) I use on some forums and social network sites.

How is isyndica helping?

If the results above are anything to go by then you can't afford to spend too much time uploading images to sites like flickr and picasa, the new isyndica promotion feature allows you to distribute your photos to more than just the microstock sites you normally use. Currently isyndica supports 5 'promotion channels' including facebook, flickr and picasa, twitpic and yfrog (both twitter image hosts). Images you choose to 'promote' are resized and watermarked with a quite clever 'fine grid' which I'd think to be almost impossible to remove but squint and you can see the photo composition almost unhindered, this along with an 'isyndica stamp'. This watermarking is an important point, the promotion feature is designed to promote not "give away" images, so while related to the results above it's not a direct help.

The promotion feature is free to use for images and costs 2c per video upload. I've only had a quick trial of the promotion with flickr, connecting the service was as simple as logging into flickr and clicking to accept the connection. I'm not quite certain how this can be fitted into my strategy, or quite how these watermarked images will be accepted by viewers on flickr. The twitter possibilities are interesting, and I'd like to see the photographers name or website (perhaps optionally) included in the watermark.

I would remind everyone that although I find flickr a great website there is more to it than just uploading photos and I feel that a lot 'ordinary stock' images will be of little interest to flicker viewers, more on that in 7 reasons your photos should be on flickr.