To microstock and back in two days

Microstocks… ask a thousand photogs what they think of them and chances are you'll get a thousand different answers.

At one end of the scale are the people who think microstock is a great way to get into shooting stock images without all the hassles of marketing. Conversely there are those who say that microstock is killing the pro end of the market by devaluing stock images to bargain bin level.

The reality for most photogs is somewhere in the middle: Microstock sites are a place to dump your low-value images and if they sell then you make some money, if not then it doesn't matter because you weren't doing anything with them anyway.

I was firmly in the "devaluing the market" category. But a recent discussion in the Strobist group on Flickr inspired me to experiment with microstock. I shoot a lot of experimental images that I'm never going to even try to market, so why not make some easy $$$ in the no-risk world of microstock?

I'll admit that I was never intending to get seriously into this. I decided to join three microstock sites and commit one hour per day maximum for a week or so, then write about the experience here as a kind of 'review' for anyone considering microstock as an option. My starting images would be the library images of Raigmore Hospital, the dark key holly images and the pictures of dying roses.

The microstock sites I decided to trial were Dreamstime, Shutterstock and iStockPhoto, the three I'd already heard of and supposedly the market leaders.

It soon became evident that my one-hour-per-day rule was going to be a problem. On the first day it took over two hours just to upload the 20 images to Dreamstime, including writing descriptions of every image, selecting which categories to put them in, and deciding on a minimum of 10 keywords. I later found out that part of this process can be automated, but the automation was slow and it's probably faster to do all of the images one at a time. All images on Dreamstime must be approved by a photo editor and a message advised me that this was likely to take around 20 hours, which I suppose is fair enough.

The two hours that Dreamstime sucked up meant that I'd already used my allotted hour for the next day, so I didn't do anything with Shutterstock or iStockPhoto. All I did that day was check the control panel on Dreamstime and note that we were rolling around to 30+ hours with all images still pending review.

My experiment with microstock ended the next day…

After a full day longer than the 20-hours estimate I received a flood of e-mails from Dreamstime notifying me of which images has been accepted and which had been rejected. Nine had been accepted and 11 rejected, mostly the Raigmore images. Now that's a kick in the ego/pride but we all know that rejection is part of this business, and the way to deal with it is to learn from it.

Fortunately, Dreamstime are courteous enough to give a reason for each and every rejection. Unfortunately some of their reasons are silly, with a variety of notes about the Raigmore images citing "poor lighting setup, poor contrast or incorrect exposure". Now I'm well aware of my abilities and I know that I'm still running just to catch up with Ansel's shadow, but I can expose an image just fine, thank you. I'd guess that Dreamstime's photo editors are looking for the sort of ultra-bright, ultra-contrasty, ultra-saturated images that adorn the pages of business reports and marketing brochures, but that's no reason to reject editorial stock as being badly exposed. Exposure is exposure, if it's true then it's right.

These images were highlighted as being badly exposed:

Note that all three are correctly exposed but they all have either a lot of dark tones or a lot of light tones. This makes me wonder if they are being 'reviewed' by a computer algorithm rather than a human?

Bizarrely a lot of the Raigmore images also had notes about copyright and trademark infringement. Yes, a couple did include logos that I'd forgotten were off-limits for stock images, so that's my fault. But others appear to have been rejected for reasons that seem absurd to me. Here are three examples:

So was that first one rejected because of the posters on the noticeboard? Was the second one rejected because the stained glass window design might be copyrighted? Presumably the third one was rejected because you can see the manufacturer's logo on the front of the ambulance?

All of that aside, though, one thing in particular made me realise that microstock really isn't for me. This next image was another that was rejected due to an unspecified copyright / trademark issue. But on the day that Dreamstime rejected it from their low-paying microstock catalogue, the BBC used it in a news story. So in one usage as a good old-fashioned news image it earned more than it was ever likely to earn as microstock.

Clearly there is a place in this world for microstock services. But let's go back to that original discussion on Flickr and consider the work of the person who started it, Konstantin Sutyagin. He's making good money from microstock, but look at the quality of his work: He's right up there with the best of them. There are people producing much lower quality work who are making much more money through the traditional client / photographer relationship. There are people on that side of the business turning seven figures annual, and many more turning at least six, and I can see no reason why Konstantin can't move into that earning bracket.

For me, no, commercial stock photography holds little interest. I'm a wannabe news photographer, that's why I got into the business and it's all I want to do. But for someone like Konstantin who has oodles of creativity and talent and is willing to invest a lot of time in filing images with microstock sites, I think he'd be well-advised to invest 10% of that time in career building and then enjoy cashing the cheques for 1,000% of what he's making from microstock.

Dump your worthless images into microstock. Don't invest a lot of time in it. If they sell then they sell, if they don't then you haven't lost much. But if you take microstock any more seriously than that then you'll be wasting time, resources and valuable images on a gamble that will make someone very rich: The people who own the microstock sites.

Bottom line: Microstock is a number's game. You won't win. Whatever money you make from microstock, you could make a lot more elsewhere.

Follow-up article: Can you afford to shoot for microstock?