Thanks to Don Giannatti for pointing me to an article by an anonymous writer who describes himself as the photo editor for a national magazine, based in New York. It's a brief piece bemoaning the poor quality of microstock photography, with this heart-warming conclusion:

I’ve bought $1 stock before but the only reason I did it is I couldn’t find a similar photo at the other stock sources and I was told we absolutely had to have a photo to illustrate this very important part of the story.

If a better photo exists, I’ll buy it.

This was an eye-opener to me because as much as I dislike microstock companies for their attitude to photographers, I've been impressed by the quality of work that people produce for them. But here's someone who actually buys the images, telling us that he doesn't think they're very good and he'll pay more to get the quality he wants. So the proper stock industry isn't dead after all, big surprise.
Now, I've previously mentioned my flirtations and disappointment with microstock (here and here) so I wanted to post a quick update. I've actually sold an image! Whoopie doo! For unconnected reasons I was over at the Dreamstime web site yesterday and out of morbid curiosity I logged in to check my stats and saw that one photo had sold. This one earned me 50 cents…

hospitalseats-420.jpg
To put that sale into perspective, a single usage of this next hospital image paid around $90 and I didn't have to jump through all the crazy, time-consuming microstock hoops with keywords and categorising.

nextappointment.jpg

You may recall that the second image was rejected by Dreamstime. So let's have a quick refresher of how this worked out:

  • Accepted microstock image: $0.50
  • Image rejected as microstock: $90 

I'd say those figures demonstrate quite nicely that traditional image sales are still preferable to microstock sales. And it's good to know that someone rated your image highly enough to pay a proper fee for using it, rather than (perhaps) using it simply because it was the cheapest they could find.

But now I have a confession to make…

Maybe I'm just shallow and pathetic and money-hungry but seeing that $0.50 appear on my Dreamstime stats rekindled my interest in microstock. After all, I'd already written it off as a lost cause, but then  50 cents had materialised without me doing any extra work. It's not a terrible deal, is it?

So I decided to upload that violinist silhouette that I did the other day. Looks to me like exactly the sort of image that could sell well as stock. I did a quick edit to clean-up the background and make it one consistent colour, and here's the result:

a6cd1873-stock-420.jpg

You can guess where this is going already, can't you?

Rejected!

This one didn't even get as far as a human reviewer. It's the nature of the beast that a silhouette will have very little detail, so the file size is quite small. I uploaded it to Dreamstime and immediately an error message popped up saying that the file was too small — upload a bigger version or get lost, kiddo! I went back into Photoshop and re-created the JPEG at the highest possible quality setting, then tried re-uploading it to Dreamstime.

Rejected!

Oh how I love that little red 'X' in the corner of my browser window. It can save you so much frustration. I waved goodbye to Dreamstime and I dare say that will be the last I see of their finickety little upload screen.