Microstocks vs. Alamy
Microstock agencies have been a hot topic for a couple of years now, and they’ve made big inroads into some areas of stock photography. Many of us abhor the idea of selling a $200 photo for a $1 download; but what if it were true - you really could sell thousands of them for $1, collect your 20 cents, and do better than if you put the same photo on Alamy?
Australian photographer Rob Walls asked himself that, and went looking for the answer. From his research, it isn’t true, at least not for the kind of subjects he shoots. Here’s a message he wrote to the Alamypro mailing list:
If anyone here needs convincing about the relative merits of alamy versus microstock, try this:
Select a subject from your collection that you have sold on alamy; note the price you got, then search the same keywords on IstockPhoto using the most downloaded parameter. Note the number of times the first picture that comes up has been downloaded. The results can be interesting.
Subjects that have earned me in excess of $1,000 on alamy, have best returns of between $10 and $165 on Istock. For example, a cute puppy shot of mine sold 3 times on alamy for approximately $1,000. The cutest most downloaded puppy shot on Istock has pulled all of 811 downloads. What’s that? $165? Picture of Uluru/Ayers Rock. 3 sales on alamy totalled over $700. On Istock, most downloaded of same subject=320. $65?
Clearly, Alamy is the winner in Rob’s experiment. I’ll try my own experiment, and I suggest you do the same - see what the real numbers are, and whether you’d rather be paid fairly for your work or join the rush to the bottom of the stock pile.
Added 9/1: Son of a gun. Rob’s right, and in a big way, for me. My subjects had a range of 6 downloads to 250 downloads. My $1600 sale was the winner, with 250 downloads - a kinda similar shot on istockphoto had 250 downloads, which is something like $50 to the photog. My $300 sale of a pomegranite bush - the most popular on the micro site had 13 downloads. The photographer made what, $2.60? Why bother? Go with the macros.
September 2nd, 2007 at 8:28 pm
Excellent, Rob. A no “bs” piece of research and analysis.
Your intelligent approach has put the smoking mirror marketing
hyperbole into bottom line perspective.
Thank you kindly,
- Theo. Bennett
The Australian Press Goup:AdvOz
Canberra AUSTRALIA
September 4th, 2007 at 3:56 pm
Thanks for the info Rob. I’ve always had a gut feeling that microstock = microdollars. I’ll stick with the macros!
September 8th, 2007 at 12:02 am
No, I’m sorry, it doesn’t quite work out as simply as that. For Microstock to make economic sense you can’t just isolate one or two images and put them toe-to-toe because per dollar RM will always win the day!
Microstock will only makes sense when you calculate your earnings from a complete portfolio. When you add the figures all up at the end of the financial year microstock will come out streets ahead.
Content that might never see the light of day again may sell for snowflakes but pack ‘em altogether and you’ve got yourself an avalanche.
September 8th, 2007 at 2:03 am
[…] selling stock as RF or RM? The author of this piece argues the case but let’s hear your opinion… Under the branch » Blog Archive » Microstocks vs. Alamy __________________ […]
September 8th, 2007 at 7:14 am
Sorry, but this way to calculate the profitability of a business is total non-sense. There is absolutly no investigation in those numbers, neither knowledge of the Micro business. You should go deeper instead of throwing invented numbers like those.
Personally last month I’ve sold images at Alamy and they’ve accounted for 62% of August’s stock income.
Yet, on most months I don’t sell anything. So, if I sum all my earnings I’ve made in the stock industry, Alamy only accounts for 30% of the total, and Microstock for 70%!
And I have a portfolio 2 times bigger in Alamy and almost the double of the age of my Micro collection (which I don’t update for 3 months).
Oh, and have I mentioned that despite my alamy sales I haven’t received any money because the costumers didn’t paid yet, contrary to Micro?
And in Micro all my images have sold at least once. In Alamy only 2% have been sold. So, all of my Micro photos earned me more money than 98% of my Alamy collection.
Do you wish to compare how valuable those 98% unsold images of my Alamy collection compared to the ones at Micro are? I think you would sing a different toone then.
Regards,
José Elias
http://www.fotoelias.com
September 8th, 2007 at 11:56 am
I agree with Jose’ I’ve been doing stock since 1968. I moved everything over to RF 3 years ago and Glad I did. The micros dont sell many Landscapes,Sunsets,travel or pets like the RM sites do. The people doing High end concept work on RF outsell anyone on any RM site.Hands down. There may be just a few exceptions. My advice is to do both If you can and really take the time and study the sites. Stock Shooting Changed quite a bit 3/4 years ago and the old dinasour sites didn’t. And those that think it’s a quality issue with RF Vs RM better take another look around. A whole bunch of shooters doing RM would have a tough time getting accepted at the top RF sites today. My 30 cents worth.
September 8th, 2007 at 3:11 pm
At first hand the logic of the article sounds real, but you have to take into acount the fact that at the micros the whole portfolio works and acts as a whole. Even the pics that you forgot about makes an ocasional sale and brings up the total.
The second important point that the author misses is that only IStock pays 0.20 cents an image, and it is of the smaller sizes, the usual payout per image is bigger that that.
The third, and most important fact of all, is that usually microstockers distribute their portfolios among a list of sites, so you have to multiply those totals by the number of sites the images are on.
In the end it would be a better exercise to compare portfolios as a whole, lets say, 500 images at Alamy (or a site like it) vs 500 images distributed among the micros. In the end I’m sure more than one would be surprised.
And last… I’m not saying that all images should go micro, but there are images that belong to those sites by being waaay tooo common.
September 8th, 2007 at 4:22 pm
These are very interesting comments and I thank you for taking the time to express them. I’ve addressed them in a new posting. If you’ve reached this page without seeing the new blog postings, please click on the words “Under The Branch” at the top of this page to load the new posting.