LookStat – Official Blog

Jonathan Ross has been a long time supporter and customer at LookStat and I’m delighted to be able to congratulate him and his network of top notch photographers on the launch of a new RM/RF stock Agency, Spaces Images. The collection is initially available at Corbis.

The collection is focused on images of human environments (interiors, locations etc) that have nobody in them. There are some fantastic shots in the collection and it’s well worth your time to check them out. Jonathan’s long experience in RM/RF helped him discover an opportunity for shots without people in them and he created Spaces to take advantage of it.

LookStat’s Role

We provided a Back Office platform that allowed Jonathan & his contributors to focus on creating the images and shaping the collection while we handled keywording, property releases, metadata, image conversion and distribution. We simplified the submission process for contributors and greatly reduced infrastructure & technology costs for Spaces.

It’s a pleasure working with Jonathan & the team of contributors at Spaces and we’re looking forward to the success and growth of the collection in the days to come.

If you are interested in how our comprehensive Back Office solution can help you, please contact us for more information.

We have been working hard over the past few weeks on a free 35-page guide for RM & RF stock photographers who are interested in microstock. Microstock is a growing part of the stock photography market and it’s important to stay informed about it, especially in light of the convergence taking place between micro & RF.

The guide provides an overview of what microstock is and how to get started. It also contains profiles of the top sites, details on their application process, and a submission checklist which covers the latest requirements for creating accounts and uploading and submitting images.

We wrote this to answer a lot of the questions we hear about microstock, especially from established stock photographers interested in adding another revenue stream to their portfolios. I hope you’ll find it a useful and helpful reference.

I know a some of you will know most of this information cold, but hopefully you know someone else that would find it useful. Please help me spread the word about this by tweeting about the guide or sharing it on Facebook.

Thank you for your help and support. As always your comments and feedback are greatly appreciated.

(I knew my Dickens would come in handy at some point.)

As I’ve written about before, microstock and traditional RF stock photography are converging and it’s important for traditional RF stock photographers to test microstock as a channel for their images.

To illustrate this, I decided to license two images. One is from iStock’s Vetta collection and the other is a royalty free image from Getty Images. I think they are both great images and the price points are comparable and that is the point.

Image 1: ‘Elderly Man & Woman on Couch in Nursing Home’ (Getty Images)

I licensed the 506 x 337 px size for $49. The pricing chart for the image is shown below:

One thing to note is that an RF license from Getty is much less restrictive than the base iStock license. There is no limit to the number of print runs from Getty for example. On iStock (as I’ll discuss below) this is not the case.

Image 2: ‘Senior’ (iStockphoto, Vetta Collection)

I licensed the 849 x 565 px sized image for roughly $20 (20 credits.) The pricing chart of this image is shown below:

As I mentioned above, the base license from iStock is much more restrictive in terms of what you can do with it when compared to the RF license from Getty. In order to bring the licenses into parity, you have to add the ‘Unlimited Reproduction’ option shown above. This brings the cost of licensing the image to $320. Essentially, licensing the images for similar purposes at the high end is equivalent in cost. (It’s interesting that the microstock license actually has more usage-based elements built in to it than the traditional RF license)

Conclusions

• Microstock and traditional RF are rapidly converging.
• The images in this post are both terrific and cost roughly the same to license.
• The microstock license has more usage restrictions than the Getty RF license.
• If you have imagery in RF, you should be submitting imagery to microstock.

The distinction between microstock and royalty free (RF) is becoming irrelevant.

If this seems a little controversial, consider the following:

• Veer announced that it is blending RF & microstock at Veer.com and moving rights managed (RM) imagery to Corbis.
• Getty launched Thinkstock this morning. This is a subscription-only site which integrates imagery from Getty, Jupiter & Istock into one blended set of search results.

Microstock and RF will be blended seamlessly from the buyer’s perspective and image buyers will be given more choice than ever before. Buyers are being presented with images in response to searches and they will buy what works best for them.

Impact on Pricing

What happens to pricing depends on your point of view. I’m optimistic that we’ll start to see pricing get tied to how often images are purchased. This form of pricing is fairly common in microstock today; all images start off at the same level and popular images go up in price. As a result:

• The best performing images earn the most.
• The lower prices of newer images ensures that they don’t get completely buried by the best-sellers. As they sell, they move up the earnings ladder.

If anything similar to this is implemented in the blended sites, prices for popular images will go up whether they began life with the ‘microstock’ or the ‘RF’ label. Conversely, images that don’t sell well will not benefit.

Ultimately, the impact on pricing is likely to be mixed, and your background in stock photography will influence how you feel about pricing. If you started in microstock, the pricing trend has been upwards. If your background is in RM/RF, then ‘upwards’ is probably not the first word that comes to mind.

Still, the market is what it is, and your choices remain the same: do nothing, adapt, or leave. I think there is still opportunity but it won’t involve doing what worked in the past.

What About Rights Managed?

There continues to be a place in the market for RM imagery, but this won’t be limited to traditional agencies. It would be easy for a site like iStock or Fotolia to implement RM licensing across their entire collections. As more traditional image buyers begin to explore self-service online channels for stock photography, it’s inevitable that sites will evolve to accommodate their requirements. This doesn’t mean a decline in pricing – images, that are in demand, unique, and hard to replicate, will always command a premium. The more likely scenario is a continued evolution towards a single stock photography licensing storefront. (Whether that is a million small storefronts integrated by Google or an individual stock photography site remains to be seen.)

Implications for Stock Photographers

• The distinction between microstock and RF is not meaningful.
• Evaluate and test your distribution options (direct, RM, Micro/RF) to find which ones work for you.
• Microstock is now a viable way to get your images in front of RM/RF buyers.

Further Reading

• Ellen Boughn – Where do you fit in Phototown?
• Paul Melcher - The New End
• Fast Media Magazine – Veer Calling Time on RF

A Parting Thought

If Thinkstock updates it’s collection every week, I think the iStock portion of the collection is going to grow the fastest. I think the same will be true at Veer and the images submitted through Veer Marketplace. It’ll be interesting to see how the editing strategies evolve to manage this aspect of their sites.