Microstock Photography

If you look at any online forum where professional stock photographers congregate, you'll notice a lot of hateful attitudes towards "microstock", or stock photography sold for pennies as compared to the typical $250. These pros argue that their livelihoods are going to go away. They argue that any picture worth buying is worth more money. They argue that my time spent shooting, uploading, and keywording, and of course post-processing, is worth much more than the pennies I get.

These photographers are all, every single last one of them, entirely and completely wrong.

When I shoot for iStockphoto.com, I don't do magic post-processing. I do spend some time editing to occasional photo, and I of course spend time keywording. And yes, it probably wouldn't be worth my time for $0.20. The fact is, however, that I never get just $0.20. The minimum I can earn is 25 cents, and that's just for a tiny photo not much bigger than the samples on the site. More often than not, I earn upwards of a dollar per sale. However, this is not my primary source of income. My photography just doesn't command thousands of dollars per photo, though someday I hope it might. The prices, ranging from $1 to $100+ (and I have earned commissions of $20/sale from time to time) encourage more people to license my photos than would choose to do so at higher prices. I make up a fair bit of the low price in volume.

This is the point where most professional photographers bring up the old joke about the businessman who sold his goods at a loss, but made it up in volume. But that doesn't apply to photography. In business, if you sell goods at a loss, then you take a loss each time you sell something. Photography is much more akin to the software industry -- building Windows Vista took 5 years and hundreds of millions of dollars, but every sale Microsoft makes simply brings in more money without increasing the development costs. Similarly, once I put in the time to make a photo available online, each subsequent sale doesn't cost me anything -- I gain each time the photo sells.

Another popular argument against Microstock is that the images are of lower quality. You can see counter-examples for yourself, or you can look at NPR's story about Mt. Everest and Mt. Chimborazo with a photograph of each mountain. Without looking at the captions, try and guess for yourself which one is the professional photograph sold through Corbis, and which is the "amateur" photograph licensed through iStockphoto. Go ahead, I'll wait.... There's no real quality difference now is there? In fact, I suspect the only reason NPR used the Corbis image was because iStock only has two photos of the mountain.

The professionals who are complaining about Microstock aren't idiots by any means -- they simply realize their old model of stock photography is going to lose. The problem with these pros is that they don't want to adjust to the new marketplace.