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Why Microstock Industry’s Growth Has Stalled
By Pywrit | March 16, 2008
One of the things I’ve been reading a lot about on various microstock forums, especially at microstockgroup.com (one of the best microstock forums on the ‘Net), is the fact that growth of sales on many sites have stalled or slowed down. Why is this? I think the answer is very simple indeed - selection.
The answer to this has been addressed many times by many photographers who seem to understand the business better than some of the microstock website owners’ themselves - and that is selection. Microstock sites are quite often very, very picky when it comes to the technical details of the images regarding focus, composition, and noise. Where they lack vision is in the selection of the photos they accept. Quite often my photos are rejected at both dreamstime.com and fotolia.com for not being “stock oriented” photos. What they mean is that the photos are not commercial in nature. However, when you view sites like Getty or Corbis, you see a very large percentage of images that are not commercial. Why? Because the macrostock sites realize that not every photo they sell is intended to sell something. Some of them are meant to be used to illustrate magazine articles, book covers, calendars, art, etc., not just to sell John’s Apple Cider. The microstock sites are unable to attract much from this sector of the industry simply because they do not understand it very well at all.
It goes deeper than even this, however. Many of the reviewers at microstock sites have no imagination. If they cannot see exactly how an image might be used to sell something, they immediately reject the image. Meanwhile, I’m cursing because I can see how an image can be used commercially for dozens, even hundreds, of types of projects.
Thankfully, there are several small sites such as FeaturePics and Geckostock that are bucking that trend - accepting images based solely on the technical aspects and not on whether it has “commercial” possibilities. It is my belief that once graphic designers, editors and advertisers begin to discover these smaller sites, they will grow and, hopefully, put the long established ones back on the defensive, forcing them to be more creative rather than simply commercial in nature. Only time will tell.
Topics: On Photography |
March 19th, 2008 at 10:42 pm
I get those rejections frequently too, and sometimes I think it’s their way of saying, “that photo is junk” without seeming insensitive.
I track my rejections and I can prove there’s no consistency across agencies. Despite this I try to find something I can learn from each rejection, which is working as my acceptance rate seems to be improving. Shooting more but submitting less might be having an influence on that too!
-Lee