There were mixed reactions to my comments about microstock agencies the other day so I thought it would be worth following up with some actual figures. Rather than debating whether or not my own photos were good enough to sell as microstock, let's look at the sort of money that's on the table for people who take the whole microstock thing more seriously.

Microstock News posted a response to my comments which offered the perspective from the other side of the fence. I started reading some of the news items on that site and this one from a couple of weeks ago offers an insight into what is considered a good deal for a microstock photographer:

Albumo is new microstock agency which offers photographers $25 if they upload 250 images. After they have uploaded 1000 Images, the photographers will join the Albumo's 100 program. This is a program where the photographer gets $0.10 for every approved image and in this way can earn max. $250. They also receive a higher commission. Some Photographers already reported to have received a payout. The Albumo's 100 program, as its name suggest, is only for the first 100 photographers who will accomplish to upload 1000 or more images.

For the sake of argument I'll suggest a best-case scenario for a photographer looking to take advantage of Albumo's juicy $25 deal. This is an absurd hypothetical, intended to illustrate how absurd the deal is.
Let's suppose you come up with a concept that will somehow allow you to design, plan and execute all 250 photos in one day. Let's say your working day is a casual 8 hours. Let's say that all of your photos are accepted. You don't have any staff to pay, no equipment to hire, no studio rental, nothing. It's all profit.

Congratulations, you just got a job that pays $3 per hour.

(Many photographers would charge around $1 per minute for the sort of high-concept work you microstockers are producing. And we get to work with nice clients who actually appreciate our efforts! Don't under-estimate the value of job satisfaction. Do you feel good about selling your work through microstock or is money the one and only reward?)

Now let's imagine you're one of the 100 'elite' microstockers that makes it into Albumo's esteemed "100 program". We'll stick with the same crazy hypothetical that you can produce 250 photos in one day, so it will have taken you four days to produce the 1,000 photos that Albumo wants. But you get $0.10 per photo! So with that first $25 and then $0.10 per photo you'll have a whopping $125 in the bank.

Congratulations, you got a raise. You're now on $4 per hour.

(Any regular photographer doing a 4-day job is likely to be charging $400+ per day. The ones doing-high concept work — for proper clients, not microstock agencies — will be on $300+ per hour.)

So that gives us a rough idea of what microstock agencies consider a good deal. They'll pay you $4 per hour for a job lasting four days. But that's with everything working in your favour. The reality is that you'll spend weeks if not months producing those 1,000 images. Take two months, working 8 hours every single day, and you're down to $0.30 per hour. What a deal eh?!

But of course there's something we haven't considered so far: Sales. The figures we've looked at so far have been one agency's special introductory offer. What about all the money you'll make from selling those 1,000 images at whatever tiny per-image value the agency places on them?

Konstantin Sutyagin gives us an insight into the sort of money that the best microstockers can make. According to his comment on Flickr he made $928.20 last month from one agency (Shutterstock) with a portfolio of 500 images.

Let's cut straight to the chase and acknowledge that this could theoretically be a good income. If Konstantin were to make that amount every month from all seven agencies that he sells his images through then he'd make $77,968.80 per year.

Not taking tax into account, that's $156 per photo!

But how realistic is it that you'll achieve that level of success? You need to ask yourself several questions:

  • Are you as good as Konstantin? Not just technically, but conceptually. Microstock is all about creating eye-catching generic images that will sell, sell, sell. Konstantin will have images in his portfolio that could fit equally well into a village newsletter, a flyer for a concert, an IT manager's budget proposal and a holiday brochure. Can you conceive an image that is so versatile? Can you do it 500 times?
  • Will you sell as many images through every agency? (Probably not. More on this in a moment…)
  • Can you do it for free? You might need to hire equipment, locations or props. Maybe you'll need to pay models, assistants or make-up artists. Don't forget travel expenses.
  • What about rejections? One frequent criticism of microstock agencies is the seemingly random nature of which images are accepted and which are rejected. Will you have a 100% hit rate? 90%? 25%?
  • Can you produce another 500 equally good images once the sales on the first batch start to dry up?

The key point here is how many images you'll sell. Using our guesswork figures, Konstantin will only make his $77,968.80 per year if he sells around 780,000 images per year at $0.10 each. (And for each of those $0.10 sales the agency will be making around ten times as much.) But let's go crazy again! Let's suppose you were to get a full $1 for every image you sell. Now you only need to sell 78,000 images per year. Is that feasible?

We can get some idea about this from a news item on Black Star Rising which reports on the so-called success story of Erik Reis. Since getting into the wonderful world of microstock "in 2005" (no month given) Erik has sold around 35,000 images through 12 agencies. Seeing as we don't know when in 2005 he started we'll go for the best-case scenario again and assume that it was December, so to date Erik has sold 35,000 images in around 20 months, or around 21,000 per year. That's less than a third of the figure for Konstantin's hypothetical income.

And whereas Konstantin has a portfolio of 500 images, Erik has over 1,300.
According to Black Star Rising, Erik's average cut of a sale is $0.50. Selling 21,000 images per year gives him an annual income of $10,500. That's $8 per image, around 1/3 the selling price of a single 8"x10" print. There are high school football photographers making $10,000+ in a couple of weekends.

It's your call…

You may wonder why someone who doesn't do microstock would care enough about the subject to write about it twice in one week. And some people will assume that it's because I don't like microstockers devaluing photography, making it harder for me to make a living.

That isn't even close to the truth. Personally I have no interest in producing stock images. I do photos for a couple of local papers, portraits, weddings, parties, and a small amount of commercial work. That's what I like doing, that's where I earn my living, and I'm happy. Microstock is not affecting my income in any way.

But I disapprove of microstock because the agencies are exploitative:

  • They require you to invest time, effort and quite possibly money into producing an image, and when you send them the finished product with all of the necessary descriptions and keywords they might accept it. If they reject it then you've lost money. If they accept it then it costs them nothing and you've still lost money.
  • They don't earn their cut. For the most part microstock isn't advertised. Agencies rely on potential customers visiting their web site, searching for an image, finding it and paying for it. Then the agency takes a 90% cut. Like any business, microstock agencies will pay the absolute minimum that they think they can get away with. Paying you 10% of the selling price for your own work shows how little respect these agencies have for you. (And who can blame them? After all, you're willing to sell at that price, aren't you?)
  • They act like it's a good deal.

Financially it doesn't matter to me if people sell their souls to microstock. It's a personal thing. I just want to add to the growing number of voices who are trying to persuade people to invest their talents elsewhere.

You need to be good to make money through microstock. If you're good enough to shoot for microstock then you're good enough to work in other areas of photography where you'll have more job satisfaction and a higher income.

And the rest of us won't think you're a mug.