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Successful Stock Strategies, Part 7 |
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Written by Richard Weisgrau
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Thursday, 30 March 2006 |
 In the early 1990s a stock photography model we called clip art (a pejorative term) was introduced. If you recall my first article in this series, it was introduced as stock for those who could not afford regular stock. It was to be an opener of a whole new market as a supplement to traditional stock. Today we call it royalty free, and it is the predominant stock photography model, and it continues to gain market share over rights managed stock, the very thing it was not supposed to harm.
Microstock has the potential to have the same effect on royalty free that royalty free had on rights managed stock. Will it? I don’t know for certain, but I think it will because, as happened with royalty free, microstock is inexpensive and the quality of its offerings is increasing rapidly. In another decade, the period it took royalty free to dominate, microstock could be the way most stock photography is licensed. That would kill off royalty free and would further choke rights managed, which could survive only by licensing images that cannot be easily mass-produced or are supplied by semi-professional photographers
Stock agencies turned the stock photography business into a
shoot-on-spec, commodity, high volume at low price business. Now a new
breed of agency owner seems perched to take stock into the final stage.
It seems headed to becoming a very high volume micropayment business.
Microstock could be the iTunes™ of the photography business except the
uses are not limited to personal use. Instead the uses can be multiple
and forever.
Will microstock get a foothold? Royalty free got a foothold and went on to dominate a market. “What goes around comes around,” and it could be just around the corner, that is, a decade or so away. So what’s a photographer to do in terms of a stock strategy, and is microstock an option for the photographer to consider? Fortunately, the options are clear. Here they are.
Option 1) You could try to stop microstock by not participating in the model. The stock photographers who would not participate in royalty free can tell you how successful that kind of effort is when it only takes a small percentage of photographers to fuel a giant marketplace for royalty free.
Option 2) You could participate in microstock, but remember in Part 6 of this series I pointed out that you have to do four times the volume of sales in royalty free to make the same income that you would receive from the same image in rights managed. If you participate in microstock, depending upon the agency you are with, you might have to do from ten to twenty times the volume to make the same income.
Option 3) You could just ignore microstock. That is what I am going to do. I can’t change the direction of the marketplace. All I can do is cope with it.
What should you do? I don’t know. Success is built by formulating strategies that are flexible and then through good tactical planning and execution. Those strategies have to be based upon a good understanding of the marketplace. I hope this series has provided some insights into the stock marketplace and its promises and pitfalls. That is the first thing you need to formulate a strategy. Next you need a personal stock photography strategic business model. I’ll be offering you a glimpse at how such a model is conceived in my next few articles in this series.
Go to Part 8
(c) 2006 Richard Weisgrau [contact] [bio]
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 08 April 2006 )
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