When thinking about costs, it’s important to think about all the factors involved. There are the direct, measurable dollar outlays associated with a shoot (location, model fees, travel time, processing time etc), but there are also many indirect costs (rent, equipment depreciation & rental, etc) that need to be considered. Finally, you need to account for factors like rejection rate. When you take into account all of these factors, you arrive at a fully loaded cost for that particular shoot.
A useful way to look at this is to take the number of selects for a shoot and come up with a cost per selected image. Naturally, quality & variety are important drivers here. If you shoot crappy pictures or don’t create enough unique variants, then you’ll have fewer unique, usable images from a particular shoot and as a result your cost per image (that you can use) will go up.
When You Reject Your Own Images, You Save Money
Typical workflow for most microstockers looks something like the following:
- Plan the Shoot
- Shoot
- Review
- Retouch
- Add Meta Data
- Upload & Submit
Each step of the workflow increases the cost of an image. As a result, ruthless editing is always worth it. The earlier in your workflow you reject an image, the more money you save. Every time you touch an image, you add to its cost. The cheapest image is one you didn’t shoot in the first place. After that, when you review it, retouch it, keyword it and finally upload it, you invest time and resources. There is direct cost but there is also opportunity cost. You invest time that might have been spent on other images. As you hear over and over again, get it right in the camera. That’s the cheapest point in the chain.
When Other People Reject Your Images, You Lose Money
It can be counter-intuitive, but the more images you reject yourself, the better off you are. Being rejected by a microstock site at the end of your workflow plays the most havoc with your costs. The most expensive image is one that you invest everything in only to have it rejected.
If your images are rejected 50% of the time, then your cost per image that you can actually sell doubles. If you spent $500 on a shoot that yielded 100 selects and 50 of them were rejected, then your cost per photo went from $5 to $10.
While there will always be some rejections that don’t make sense, in the early stages of your microstock career there may be legitimate, technical reasons why your images are being rejected. When we started, our rejection rates were horrible because we had to learn about the microstock standards for noise, lighting, composition, sharpness, etc. Fortunately, supportive reviewers and helpful feedback from the community helped us figure out what we needed to do to meet the technical requirements for microstock.
Master the technical issues. It takes effort, but it’s worth it. Ultimately, you want to minimize rejections. Getting an image approved is no guarantee of success, but being rejected at the final stage of the pipeline really sucks. The least you can do is manage the factors that you can control.
Efficiency & Profitability
Ultimately, managing the cost equation in microstock is all about efficiency. Minimizing waste and time in your productions is how you keep your costs low. Good planning, strong technical execution and ruthless editing are the key tactics you can employ. Ultimately you want to find a way to minimize the cost of each accepted image. (Note: don’t be penny-wise, pound foolish – make sure you invest enough to meet the minimum quality thresholds.)
Low costs aren’t the full story though. Profitability is about the spread between cost and revenue and the ideal situation is when you can produce images with high earning power at low cost. (I know – I’m incredibly perceptive.)
I’ll be talking more about the revenue side, analytics and how LookStat can help in the coming weeks. In the meantime, happy shooting.
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