Photographs For a Dollar Anyone?
Post Excerpt:
The world of stock photography is in turmoil at the moment, with microstock agencies popping up like weeds and the professional stock photographer facing a loss of income. Who will win the battle of the stock photograph? The professional or the microstocker?
Stock photography, for those unfamiliar with the term, refers to an industry that licenses images for specified uses. Agencies (or individual photographers) act rather like a library, where photographs can essentially be checked out for a fee depending on the type of use. Like a library book, there’s no limit to the number of times a photograph can be used, providing the photographer with a potentially lucrative income from their portfolio.
We’ve all seen stock photography, whether we realize it or not – in magazine articles, print ads, brochures, on web sites. Stock photographs are almost everywhere, and professional photographers have made a good living off the business of producing stock for many years.
But, like other areas of the photography industry, the business of stock photography has undergone a major upheaval over the last few years or so, especially so since the introduction of digital photography…
What is Stock Photography?
Some of the questions asked frequently on photography forums deal with how photographers can get into the stock photography business, what the industry is like, what can they expect to make from it etc. so I thought I would write this short article to examine some of these issues in the light of the current situation.
Commercial stock photography used to be a very specialized business with a relatively small number of participating photographers. Various agencies would hold copies of slides in their archives and supply the needs of companies or individuals that required images of specific things. The license fees to use the images were often several hundred dollars to thousands of dollars or more per use, and the photographers could make a steady income from this business.
But then digital came along, together with the rise of the Internet, and everything began to change. Now, with the prevalence of digital cameras, anyone who enjoys photography can theoretically become a stock photographer. Some people have made a lot of money at selling their images, there’s no doubt of that at all, but the vast majority have not. The forums at the stock photography sites are packed with messages from disgruntled and disillusioned photographers who are selling little or nothing and looking for someone to blame.
When microstock arrived the simple law of supply and demand showed up and really started to turn the world of stock photography upside down and inside out. All of a sudden, the supply of stock photographs ballooned to tremendous proportions – but the individual value of each photograph plummeted in response. The sub-industry of microstock photography was officially born when Bruce Livingstone started iStockPhoto – a free stock photography web site. He sold the site to Getty Images in 2006 for a reported $50 million. Today, iStockPhoto and a host of other microstock sites sell images for very small amounts each (from 20 cents to $10). Moreover, the images are sold “royalty-free”, which means that the buyer can use the image almost as many times as they like without ever paying another fee.
It’s clear that photographers selling through these microstock sites have to sell a LOT of images to make anything like a reasonable amount of money.
Who’s Watching The Farm?
Common sense and logic might suggest that photographers would be very unhappy with this kind of arrangement. After all, there’s the investment in camera & computer equipment, travel expenses, time in the field, processing time, storage space, backup costs, time spent uploading, adding keywords etc. Not to mention the creative skills needed to produce quality work. Surely, the photographer should expect a reasonable return on this kind of investment?
This is the point where common sense and logic pack their cases and go on vacation, leaving insanity home alone.
Surprisingly, many photographers are quite happy with this arrangement – to rely on selling hundreds or thousands of copies of each image in order to garner any kind of return on their investment. I fail to think of any other profession where people are prepared to work for such a low return voluntarily and in such large numbers – and to do so enthusiastically! It boggles the mind to think about it.
How in the world did this happen?
As I see it, there are two main reasons at the core of it all:
· The vast majority are not professional photographers
· There is a subtle, but effective psychological effect at work
Firstly, the participants are mostly not professional photographers. Perhaps some of the really successful ones at the top might be, but the rest are mostly enthusiastic and often very talented amateur photographers. Professional photographers who are serious about making a good living from their photography and value their own work will have nothing to do with the microstock industry – to the point where there’s actually an unseen war raging between those who do and those who won’t! There’s a lot of name-calling and mud-slinging on various forums about this whole issue, and I’m sure my own mail box will fill up with hate mail as a result of daring to write this article!
I am no psychologist, but I believe the second reason for the success of microstock against all logical sense is a psychological one, and a clever one at that. Photographers are, at heart, artists – people who want to have their work accepted and admired. There’s nothing wrong with that at all, it’s human nature. The microstock agencies, such as iStockPhoto, have come up with a clever way of feeding that need in the amateur photographer – almost an analogue of the fifteen minutes of fame we’re all supposed to get at some point in our lives (I’m still waiting for mine).
You Too Can Become One of Us!
To begin with, the microstock agencies created a strict selection process for images submitted to their collection. With some, you even have to pass a test before you can start. The guidelines for submission on some sites are tough to understand, let alone adhere to. This gives the false impression that the accepted photographer is somehow special, and that the accepted photographs must be of super-high quality. Already, the photographer is being emotionally set-up – they feel part of an elite group.
Next comes the real trick. When an image is sold, the sale itself creates a warm mental buzz that’s totally unrelated to the amount the image sold for. Someone liked the photograph enough to actually BUY it (even if it was only for a dollar or two). It doesn’t even matter that the photographer probably has no idea who bought the photograph, or for what purpose, the fact is it SOLD!! That in itself is often enough to satisfy the photographer’s need. If they’re lucky, there’s an even greater thrill in store if the photographer happens to find the image in print or on a web site somewhere.
Yeah! I Sold One!
I recall one particular message on the iStockPhoto forum where a photographer proudly announced that he’d found one of his images in print – a whoop of joy at having a photograph considered good enough to actually use in the real world, where other people could see his work! He was ecstatic over it, and received many responses patting him on the back and congratulating him for his achievement.
I have to admit I was left scratching my head on this one – why, I thought, would someone jump for joy at being so blatantly robbed? Yes, robbed! This poor man had sold a photograph for about $1 to Wal-Mart, who had used it as the background on a flier of some sort for their stores. That’s right – Wal-Mart – the largest retailer on Planet Earth, had effectively paid this guy $1 to use an image who knows how many times. How can anyone be HAPPY at that? No one can really blame Wal-Mart or the countless other companies that buy microstock – they are just buying the resource as cheaply as they can. The problem for me is that it shouldn’t be available at that price at all.
No wonder real professional photographers all over the place are sick and tired of the microstock industry – it’s like imagining a world chock full of amateur lawyers selling their time on the street at 50 cents an hour. The real lawyers would get a bit upset at that – at the very least, they’d probably find some way to sue the amateurs!
At the end of 2007, PhotoShelter made a valiant attempt to try to combat this by setting up a new stock agency that would negotiate fair rates to photographers for their images. Despite making good inroads and having some success they were forced to close the service by the end of 2008.
Currently, PhotographersDirect.Com is one of the few major players left in this market – providing a great gateway between professional photographers and those clients seeking unusual images for a fair price. They are so anti-microstock that they don’t allow photographers to even register if they have images for sale on microstock sites.
A Peek Into The Future:
Will microstock ever go away completely? No, I don’t think so. Is the professional photographer doomed when it comes to selling their professional commercial work? I hope and believe not.
Microstock is very successful at the moment, but I believe there’s a demon lurking in their future – one of their own making. When I last looked, iStockPhoto had over 4 million images on file. Alamy has more than 14.5 million as of today. That’s a lot of photographs. Eventually, maybe not tomorrow, but eventually, I think these organizations will simply become a victim of their own size. What happens when they reach 100 million, 1 billion or 10 billion images? The consumer will become overwhelmed in trying to sort through too many search results trying to find just the right image that they may in fact prefer to go to a more traditional stock agency to experience a better quality of service. For commercial consumers, time is money, and it might be more economical to search in places that give faster results.
I don’t have a crystal ball into the future but maybe the microstock agencies will be forced to expunge their databases or limit the number of images. But, if they do, the photographers (they are artists with a need, remember) might simply quit submitting their images and follow the consumer on the more traditional route.
In the end, I suspect that an equilibrium will eventually be reached that satisfies both professional stock and the amateur microstock industry – a situation where an uneasy co-existence is in place and where the boundaries become smudged and fuzzy.
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I couldn’t agree more. I’d rather give my friends and family a nice print for free as a gift rather than hand away my work to complete strangers who are only going to exploit it. I’d rather make little to no money in photography, rather than throwing my pride away only to make little or no money.
Outside of economics, a substantial part of the problem stems from our instant gratification society. People think that all of a sudden by giving away their work, it’s going to lead to huge publishing deals, and tons of money. I doubt that’s the reality.
So with labor there is a minimum wage atleast, so even if you hate your job, you know you’re atleast going to get something of monetary value that has VALUE you can use! Maybe a min. wage for photos based on size/use? I think we just need a standardized law in place that will level the playing field and make things fair; or we can patiently await the market to grind it out.
Finally, I agree, I believe that editors seeking good work will grow sick of sifting through thousands of images and will fall back on the old faithfuls that produce quality work consistently, and most importantly, only submit work that is their best. This does not exist on istock; there are so many images that look like they were taken by blind people…and in many ways, they are blind.
You could take this in many directions, but I think good/passionate photographers are sort of dealing with what workers in the manufacturing sector in this economy are going through: Jobs shifted elsewhere in favor of cheaper labor. Eventually though it WILL come full circle, and people will realize that you’re only cheating yourself by giving your work away, no different from cheating yourself by buying from corporations that ship jobs overseas, treat employees like crap, etc. You VOTE with your money you spend, not by whom you elect. Lets hope that editors will eventually follow suite.