After my previous article was published at this Website, I received a few emails asking what amounted to be the same question: Is Microstock sustainable from photographers and agencies perspectives? I think it is.The first clue to its sustainability is the fact that it is growing. More Microstock agencies are cropping up on the Internet, and those agencies collections continue to grow. That indicates at least the minimal necessary supply of images will be available as Microstock. With the supply available the obvious next question is what about the demand? The fact is that there will never be a shortage of demand for good photographs at the unbelievably low prices of Microstock. Buyers are looking for the best deal they can get, and if the image a buyer wants is in Microstock, and the rights needed are available, then why spend more when you can spend less. So the demand equation is settled. Both exist, and by virtue of that fact, Microstock is sustainable.
The second clue to its sustainability is found in the scope of the enterprises. It takes a substantial investment to put a Microstock agency online with the offline business infrastructure needed to make it work. Investors who make such investments dont do it without good prospects for getting a good return on their investments. They acquire market research that leads them to believe the investment is a good one. Likewise, companies like Jupiter and Getty do not buy Microstock agencies unless they can see that profitability is going to be there. Jupiter and Getty offer Microstock to compete with others who do, in order to capture their share of that market. They do so even if they know Microstock will cut into their Royalty Free (RF) sales. Microstock is here to stay and, if Jupiter and Getty are going to lose RF sales to Microstock, those two companies want to be recapturing some of those lost RF sales within their own organizations. Jupiter and Getty knew Microstock would get a foothold, and they purposefully engaged in Microstock to get their own footholds in that market.
The third clue comes from the user marketplace itself. There is a major transition going on in the creative communication business. The reliance on printed applications has been and continues to decline. Many magazines have shrunk in scope and size as Websites offer better alternatives. CD-Rom, DVD, and Websites replace catalogs and brochures. Advertising on the Web increases as it decreases in print. No, print is not dead; it is different, and overall it does not use as many photographs as it did previously. On the other hand, the Web grows daily in size and nature. More and more Websites, more and more advertising, greater demand for content including photographs, a growing audience, multi-media capability, and the low cost of distribution make the Web the ideal way to communicate to the masses as well as to niches. The Web not only has a great craving for images, but it also has a great desire to change those images often. That means it needs a high volume of low price images. And, if you recall from my preceding article, Royalty Free has been the high volume/low price stock photo model for decades. Today, Mircostock is part of that high volume/low price model that is the source of images for a growing marketplace spawned by the World Wide Web.
So the agencies can sustain Microstock, but can photographers? The answer is that some photographers can. Who are those photographers? They fall in two camps. There is the photographer who can produce photography in high volume with appealing images, and there is the photographer who is not dependent on Microstock for an income. Like RF, the key to making a living from Microstock is to constantly produce a volume of it, knowing that its shelf life is short. Collections grow at a rapid pace and new images quickly become old. New images come up first on searches, and new images are more likely to be selected by buyers. To play in that kind pool, you have to be a competent high speed and long distance swimmer. On the other hand, the occasional producer of Microstock might be an assignment photographer, or a teacher, lawyer, or truck driver. By not being dependent on Mircostock for an income, they can submit images as available, and earn revenues on occasion. So we see that some photographers can sustain the Microstock model, and they are doing it today.
The bigger question is how will Mircostock affect the other models in the stock photography marketplace? Ill address that question in my next article.
(c) 2006 Richard Weisgrau [contact] [bio]
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