MicrostockGroup Blog - Latest Comments

Re: Changing Photography Business

Adrian — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 04:09:48 -0000

Great and very informative article! Thank you!

Re: Changing Photography Business

cobaltstock — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 07:35:45 -0000

That is a great post with a lot of information Jim, thank you! And thank you very much for buying from stocksy, this is the first time I see stocksy images in use! :)

Re: Changing Photography Business

Guest — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 10:53:03 -0000

Wow, phenomenal post jim, very thorough and accurate, thanks :)

For some additional info on how many images there are around, I produced a short video last year showing 'roughly' how many images are on the internet, you might want to check it out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

Re: 2012 Microstock Industry Survey – First Look

W. S. Shepard — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 11:24:38 -0000

Thanks for this quite useful information. You present the data in a quite understandable form.

I would like to make a suggestion for next year's survey. I am wondering how "telling" the chart on "highest RPI" really is. Clearly, it shows Shutterstock as the greatest earner per image. Of course, that number includes iStock earners that are obviously non-exclusive. I recently compared my iStock earnings (exclusive) to earnings from someone that had their content on many sites. It turns out that as an exclusive I was making more per image than they were making per image conglomerate on many sites, including ShutterStock. As a result, it would be nice to break out RPI for exclusives and non-exclusives for each site. The anonymous data could simply include the amount earned per site, the number of images on each site, and whether the contributor was exclusive to that site. Then, the RPI chart could actually be two charts, one for exclusive contributors and the other for non-exclusive. Such information would be extremely useful to those considering the advantages or disadvantages of exclusivity.

Re: 2012 Microstock Industry Survey – First Look

Enstoker — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 01:33:57 -0000

Great job.
Respect

Re: 2012 Microstock Industry Survey – First Look

Tyler Olson — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 14:33:29 -0000

Yeah, it would certainly be interesting and useful to have every stock site with their upload numbers and income. I haven't asked agency specific questions because I feel the survey is already quite long and I the extra questions would break the balance of keeping the survey easy to answer. Perhaps one solution would be to give people the choice of answering the 'extended' survey or 'short' survey

Re: 2012 Microstock Industry Survey – First Look

Dave — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 12:02:47 -0000

Thanks very much Tyler.
For this to really be helpful, we need to know how many photographers have how many files with each agency.
Total, average, and median files with each agency. Total and average photographers with each agency. Maximum, average, and median files per photographer with each agency. etc.

Re: 2012 Microstock Industry Survey – First Look

Jo Ann Snover — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 11:27:46 -0000

One option that would not require an e-mail address would be to generate a PDF with their entries and let the user save it. A number of sites i use let you save PDFs of what you've done, so I assume there's some toolkit or browser plugin out there to do that (i.e. I don't know of one but assume there must be)

Re: 2012 Microstock Industry Survey – First Look

Dennis Cox — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 10:01:45 -0000

Great insight, thanks so much for doing this!

Re: 2012 Microstock Industry Survey – First Look

Max Protsenko — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 09:05:50 -0000

Ok, I think You now about process absolutely better than me. Will not do my presumptions more.
Thank You Tyler!

Re: 2012 Microstock Industry Survey – First Look

Tyler Olson — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 08:59:31 -0000

Yes, it would be automated but the email address would still be linked to the answers in the database and render the survey non-confidential.

Re: 2012 Microstock Industry Survey – First Look

Max Protsenko — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 08:56:41 -0000

I even didn't think about doing this by someone. I only imagine this like automated function.

Re: 2012 Microstock Industry Survey – First Look

Tyler Olson — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 08:48:21 -0000

That is a good idea but would also require me to gather email addresses as part of the data. As it is now, the survey is completely anonymous. Perhaps that could be an option for those who wanted however - I'll check into it.

Re: 2012 Microstock Industry Survey – First Look

Microstock Posts — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 08:46:26 -0000

Great survey Tyler, thanks for your effort in this. I think most of us have been aware for some time that earnings at iStock have been falling and Shutterstock's increasing, interesting to get an indication of the extent of this with the survey.

Re: 2012 Microstock Industry Survey – First Look

Avinash K Jain — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 08:44:52 -0000

Thank you Tyler!!! Keep up the Good work!!

Re: 2012 Microstock Industry Survey – First Look

Max Protsenko — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 08:40:23 -0000

Thank You, Tyler!
Great and very interesting results.
Just thought it will be good to receive own answers after taking part in survey. Some numbers calculated specially for survey and I can't remember it now :-). It will be interesting to compare my answers with results or my old answers. If it is possible, will be great to see this next year.
Thanks.
Max

Re: 2012 Microstock Industry Survey – Sneak Peek

Tyler Olson — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 05:27:11 -0000

Well.. after looking at the results closers (and again) getting ready to publish the full results later today, I discovered there was a typo in the infographic. The 7% primary income stat was copied from the outsourcing numbers. I've corrected the infographic and I believe the correct numbers make a bit more sense.

Re: 2012 Microstock Industry Survey – Sneak Peek

Tyler Olson — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 05:25:22 -0000

:) Thanks. I've fixed it now.

Re: 2012 Microstock Industry Survey – Sneak Peek

Petr Toman — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 09:52:02 -0000

My girlfriend just notice, that it is quite good income from microSOCK :D so just fyi, so you can fix it in final version.
Thanks a lot for the hard work !

Re: 2012 Microstock Industry Survey – Sneak Peek

ilbusca — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 04:26:11 -0000

Thanks!

Re: 2012 Microstock Industry Survey – Sneak Peek

Tyler Olson — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 03:51:10 -0000

Re; full timers not having their primary source of income from micro. I'm not entirely sure who they all are. One person's example was a retired person who only works with mirostock now and considers himself full time microstock, but still receives more income from a pension. I'll look at the full stats and see if I can figure anything out or perhaps people who answered in that way will speak up.

Re: 2012 Microstock Industry Survey – Sneak Peek

Tyler Olson — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 03:49:30 -0000

25% of the respondents are iStock exclusive - they only submit to iStock so we know that 100% of their microstock income comes from there. They weren't shown the question "Where do you earn the most income" .. so the %'s from that question are for non-exclusives only.

I suppose I should have lumped the rest of the sites into 'other'. Other on the infographic should really be 20%. You'll see the full breakdown on the full results I post next tuesday. The sites that you don't see are Bigstock, Canstock, DepositPhotos, Veer, PhotoDune + several more. Those are the ones that make up the 16%

Re: 2012 Microstock Industry Survey – Sneak Peek

Marco Venturini Autieri — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 20:00:34 -0000

Exclusive on iStock does not mean not working on anything else. You might be a mason and exclusive on iStock at the same time.

Re: 2012 Microstock Industry Survey – Sneak Peek

ilbusca — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 17:58:32 -0000

If 25% of the respondents are exclusive on istock, how is it possible that only 9% of the respondents have istock as largest income source? What is the other 16% largest income? They don't submit anywhere else...

If 204/708 (almost 29%) of the respondents are full time microstockers, how is it possible that only 7% of the respondents have microstock as primary income? There is 22% of them that work full time on it but they get more money from something else?

Nice work by the way!

Re: 2012 Microstock Industry Survey – Sneak Peek

Tyler Olson — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 04:45:44 -0000

Agreed. Perhaps I'll have to work that question into the poll next year.