Stock Photography

Which site offers the best deal for the photographer who wants to sell? I am

getting confused researching all these sites.

Thanks,

Jimmy

It really depends on what type of images you have to offer. Getty and Corbis for best

return/image but getting in might be a bit hard. Alamy gives a bigger chunk of the sale

prices to the photographers compared to most. Rough estimate over the last couple of

years sales for me at Alamy average around $200/sale/image - this would be for non-RF

sales.

Then there's always the microagencies if you're happy with selling all rights to your photos

for all eternity for a few dollars a pop. For many photographers micro's are probably a

great fit, I don't like them because I think they trick a lot of photographers to give away a

lot of future money earning potential for a pittance. But, that's just MHO and I'm sure

there are plenty of photographers out there who love the micro's and for whom they work

very well.

As succinctly as I can put it... I despise microstock.

I think they prey upon and take huge advantage of the uninformed, plus have done a lot of serious damage to the stock photo industry in the process. They've devalued stock images and created a real mess, on the whole. ("Royalty free" is a related, but separate issue.)

There is an argument that says to place your good stuff with traditional stock agencies, and use microstock as a means of getting a bit of extra income off your "lesser" work.

I'm not buying into this, for four primary reasons:

One is just on principle. I don't want to support any of the microstock agencies, period.

Plus there's real work involved in keywording, optimizing and uploading each image, with very little return from microstock. I'd rather put the same energy into something that's a lot more productive: such as getting more new work in the can or getting more of my quality stuff placed with traditional agencies, perhaps expanding representation into new areas.

A third thing is that having some of your work offered through microstock might work against you with traditional agencies. There's a nagging concern about devaluing *all* your work or any possible mixups that cause problems with their clients. But at the very least it's just not a good way to build and cement relationships with traditional agencies.

Finally, I really don't want my poorer quality work out there, at all. That's what I have a trash can for.

Enough about microstock, I'll get off that soap box now.

Frankly, I'm not a fan of Getty and Corbis either. Granted, they are both very big and draw the most searches by photo buyers, so you stand a better chance of getting sales. But, their sheer size also let's them bully their photographers, compared to some other traditional agencies. I think I saw in Photo District News that Getty might be sold again, too. That would be twice in recent years, and that makes me a little nervous.

I'm impressed with Alamy.com, Indexstock.com (now merged with Photolibrary.com) and Acestock.com.

But, do yourself a favor and get a copy of "Photographers Market 2008". It's $20-25 well invested! It's got about 60 pages of stock agency listings, complete with contact info, how they want to review your work and what their expectations or any specializations might be. You can check if they are members of PACA (Picture Archive Counsel of America, www.pacaoffice.org) or not.

I hope some other people "name names" and will be following this thread closely.

Cheers!

Jimmy,

I use Photoshelter. You get a choice of RF (royalty free) or RM (rights managed) AND 70% of your sales and it is free to join if you choose the Collection (if you are new at stock photography like me this is the option you should choose to break yourself in.) If you choose the Archive (used by seasoned professionals, like wedding photographers to showcase their work to clients, etc.) there is a monthly fee and you get 100% of your sales. This is a great new stock photography company with a great crew of editors and the forum is fantastic and fun. Give it a try www.photoshelter.com

Regards,

Cate

One thing that one must consider is that the photo industry has ballooned in many directions at the same time since the introduction of digital photography and the use of the internet as a distribution channel. As a result, the number of buyers and sellers has not only grown, but the types of people involved in the supply chain has grown to include a great deal of people and sub-industries that were never involved before. The advent of microstock is a classic example: it has risen to provide a sales platform for largely semi-pros and consumers who want a dumping ground for their images. Similarly, the buyers range all over the map, but largely include the low-end small business that never bought images before at all.

Unfortunately, the "culture" of the photo industry hasn't changed, so as they view these changes in the photo market, they do so through the same glasses they did back in the old days when ONLY stock agencies sold images. So, they fail to take a bigger picture into account, and come up with misperceptions about the nature of the industry. One classic example is the impression that microstock has hurt pricing across the board. No, it hasn't. Pricing was already hurt across the board simply because of the vast influx of images from everyone in the world, combined with the ease of distribution over the internet. That's what brought prices down, combined with the larger number of buyers at lower-end businesses. Microstock agencies are merely a byproduct of that.

As for why stock agencies in general have failed to perform well in this new environment is very much related to that failure of the older industry stalwarts to change (culturally) with the times. Their economic models were based on licensing formulas that are largely successful in higher-end business negotiations, whereas the industry has moved more towards a consumer-pricing psychology. The above article I wrote cites several papers by stanford and harvard business school professors that discuss the psychology of consumer pricing, and when you apply that pricing model, combined with proper consumer marketing techniques, prices do not, in fact, need to fall as dramatically as has been felt by the industry leaders, such as Getty and Cobis, et al.

coming full circle to your question, none of the stock agencies today truly understand the full scope of how the photo industry has changed, nd as a result, they are applying traditional sales models towards old-school buyers, which means that only a very small percentage of the photographers who contribute to those agencies are going to do very well, and the rest of them (those who are not already established pros with a lifetime of photos under their belts and name-brand recognition to help boost sales and price perception) are going to do very, very poorly.

Any photographer that wishes to enter the stock industry today MUST do so through self-representation on their own website, while also accumulating a very large body of work over time. The best time to join a stock agency is when your own sales become so time-consuming that you can't respond to all your customers in a timely manner, that you need to offload that work to agencies. They don't _create_ sales as effectively as they can merely handle sales overflow that you can't handle efficiently.

dan

Before you get really worked up about these things, have an opinion on your images. Are they like your folio? If they are, you may need just a touch more expertise / content etc.

Practise and try to sell some work to commercial clients, that will be a reality check.

Peter