2009-01-11, 18:33:57
Cytat:Many traditional stock photographers question whether it will ever be possible to earn enough money from microstock production to justify the effort. Ron Chapple’s experience is instructive.
For more than two decades, Chapple has been a leader on the cutting edge of each new trend in stock photography. In 2006, he decided to test the microstock waters; in February 2007, he launched iofoto as a platform for delivering images to microstock portals. Selling Stock reported on his initial experiences in October 2007. Here is an update on two years of experience.
He said: “Overall, I am no longer bullish on the opportunity for individual photographers within the microstock licensing sector. The distributors will make money, but with ever-increasing supply, statistics do not favor the contributor. Yes, there will be a few superstars, and yes, a number of shooters will be able to supplement their stock income.”
It is important to remember that there are only a few superstars making significant revenue marketing their images as rights-managed or traditional royalty-free. The vast majority of those whose images are traditionally marketed do not earn enough to support themselves producing stock alone. Whether the rights-managed superstars outnumber microstock superstars is questionable.
Chapple points out that there are challenges of earning significant revenue through microstock. He says: “Revenue diversity is good, and the data alone that is available to a microstock provider—compared to that supplied by traditional agencies—is well worth the price of admission.”
Iofoto started with a collection of about 5,000 images. Now, there are 15,476 images in the collection, and Chapple has invested over $600,000, or an average of $38.77 per image, to produce the collection. Including himself, he has two other full-time employees who produce images, the copyrights on which belong to the company. This is important, because many distributor sites require that there only be one copyright holder per account.
Given the investment, iofoto is still not profitable. Still, for the last 8 months, the images have been generating about $25,000 per month, so “breaking even is now in sight,” said Chapple.
Before getting into microstock, Chapple created, built and sold, in the summer of 2004, Thinkstock, a traditional royalty-free company. He said: “Those same 15,000 traditional images would be creating at least 10 times that revenue three years ago.” (It must be noted that there have been some drastic declines in the revenue generated in the traditional royalty-free market since 2004.)
Iofoto is distributed through 20 different portals, but since each distributor has a different editing process, the numbers represented by each on a non-exclusive basis vary. While the top distributor tends to vary every month, the top five always remain the same. Despite being lowest in return-per-download, Shutterstock is almost consistently first in revenues. Typically, Dreamstime is second, and iStockphoto, Stockxpert and Fotolia alternate in positions three through five.
Chapple said: “iStock continues to fall among our top distributors, but in the past four months, our iStockphoto revenues have decreased by over 50%, even though we added 20% more images to our collection. My understanding is that last summer, iStockphoto made a significant change to the search-result formula to favor exclusive photographers.” It is hard to explain the logic for favoring exclusive photographers, when iStockphoto keeps 80% of a non-exclusive sale and only 60% of an exclusive one.
“We need to keep in mind that we are only about two years into mainstream marketing of microstock,” Chapple points out. “The next two years will be even more interesting!” He concludes: “Regardless, I am optimistic about the future of photography and the overall future of stock. Opening the gates to all photographers has been long overdue, and we are seeing a continued creative explosion as more and more photographers can fund their work through microstock revenues. We do see ‘copycatting’ of images and keywords, but I see this diminishing as photographers realize that they only hurt themselves. A changing of the guard brings fresh perspectives—both in business and photographic creativity.”