$2,400 from 1 site vs. $11,000 from 7 sites….hmmm.

hmmmm.. while this photographer makes this much from seven sites, many are equaling or exceeding this amount using one site.

Were the photos on Alamy that you sold RF or RM? This was a one month test? As they say in stock, the larger the portfolio the better the chances of having your images found, so only using 10 photos on istockphoto, is that really a fair test in a month?

I currently have 20 photos uploaded to istock and have 17 downloads, which is pretty good to me, but I know I have been slacking in getting more uploaded. After reading this article, I applied at Alamy and was accepted, I am just not sure how to handle the files there. Should I use my best photos and should I go RM instead of RF and post my rejects from Alamy to micro stock sites?

Thanks for the great blog, keep the info stream coming!

Something else that nobody has mentioned is the near impossibility of getting into one of the big stock agencies. Yes, if I could be selling my images as RM, I would be. But it is almost impossible to get in. I know, I have been trying for the past five years. And yes, you can make the statement that maybe my images are not good enough to get in…. but I have been with istock for the past ten months and made over $1200.00 last month.

Bottom line, everything changes. With increased competition, prices will drop. Microstock is here to stay, and hopefully, so if Rights Managed (just in a bit of a different business plan that in previous decades). And don’t forget, Getty owns Istockphoto……..

You have now, thanks to crowd sourcing, much more competition. With more competition, prices are going to fall.

That’s how it is.

There’s nothing you can do about that unless you create barriers to competition (like a rep that will only select the ‘best’ photographers). When you have so many stock sites that allow anyone to upload similar products, the price of those products must go down.

The only way to survive is to sell at a lower cost than your competition (assuming you have a similar product).

The end is nigh.

If a ‘pro’ photographer cannot produce a photograph that is vastly superior to that of the ‘amateur’, then that pro photographer will soon be looking for another job.

microstock offers these average photographers a chance to make a few bucks. it also drops the overall value of photographs in general. of course “real photogs” like Haje have a problem with microstock. in much the same way that factory workers hate illegal immigrants or computer guys hate bangalore. photography is being outsourced. it won’t be stopped, regardless of articles like this one

The people who buy my images include churches, teen summer camps, blog writers, and grandmothers printing newsletters. Without microstock, these people wouldn’t be buying stock at all.

If the “professionals” with their expensive lighting and high-paid models contribute to a photograph with a greater value than my own, then sure, they should get paid more. But look at it another way. Maybe you can get much the same results with creative techniques, digital gear, cheap lighting rigs (like the photographers on strobist.blogspot.com use), and attractive friends. Maybe to the majority of photography consumers there’s not much of a difference between my photos and your photos, except that mine were cheaper to produce.

You see, in my opinion, every article like this is tantamount to whining. If you can find a buyer for your image at the price that you want, then go right ahead and do it, but don’t criticize the way I choose to make my own buck because it’s not for you. If I’m cutting into your sales because your clients would rather pay me less money, then either (1) they didn’t need your quality to begin with, or (2) I can produce the same quality image as you, but cheaper.

Just like all things, the market will bear it all out. Whether you like it or not, there’s a bunch of us perfectly happy to shoot for microstock. Just because we’ve found a way to sustain our photography hobbies and live perfectly comfortably doing so doesn’t make us, or microstock, the enemy.

In classic stock - your costs per shoot are high and you select less photos to submit. Then your sales in count are quite lower than microstock.

In microstock you can have very cheap shoots, you can have moderately cheap shoots. Then you sell a lot of copies of a lot of images.

The best contributors of istockphoto are given the chance to submit to Getty’s RF libraries.

Their feedback is not too optimistic. Generally it does not seem the profits to be higher (or at least much higher).

As for the image on Times Magazine from istockphoto:
The guy who shot the image would probably get like $50 instead of what a $1000? I dunno. But you forget that he is probably not a pro, and the alternative was to not have his photo on istock and anywhere else. Thus the alternative is not that he got more money, but that he would not have his photo used at all.

Either way, if your average is $1.5 versus $50, then the point still stands, right? That’s still a very serious difference in what is essentially the same product.

You compare apples to bananas to chicken (or whatever).

Your 20x and 3x estimations are completely wrong. You do not point out if it is RF or RM images.

On average an image at istock sells at $1.5 for me. It can top at a bit over $50 (this is my cut) if it is extended licensed (over 500K uses). This is not a lot, but not pennies too.

The average (nowadays) for the classic ‘big’ stock sites give about $50 per sale for Royalty Free. This is your cut. Numbers from some of the Getty and Corbis photographers.

Keep in mind we are speaking in ‘average’ numbers. Some of the sales are $150 (your cut, the total is higher, sometimes much higher), and sometimes it could be just as microstock - a dollar or less - when your photograph is a part of Photodisc sale.

Another thing to consider is the marketing that is done by the respective sites. I don’t think any of the micro payment sites have yet to really break into the big time. iStockPhoto has some great work, but a lot of it is not great, which diminishes its appearance and the value of the respective works. Also, people should be able to apply their own fee structure to each photo, but I don’t believe they allow that (I could be wrong).

One of these days, Flickr will turn into a micro-payment site, and put the commercial stock photo sites into a talespin. But that’s just my opinion.