Yuri Arcurs describes himself as "the world’s top selling microstock photographer", but even he is now taking a negative view of the business. In a message on Microstockgroup.com he says that he has spent over $40,000 in three months of 60-hour weeks, producing over 2,000 of what he considers to be his highest quality images. Yet the only change in his income has been a 5% drop.

As usual when talking about microstock, let's have a quick look at the sickeningly exploitative maths: $40,000 to produce 2,000 images means an average per-image production cost of $20. Each sale as microstock would earn anything from $0.10 to $1 or maybe even a bit more if Yuri is on the highest commission rate, but still he's going to need to sell every photo around 20 times just to break even. And if that happens — if he only breaks even — then in the process he'll have earned hundreds of thousands of dollars for the microstock agencies.

How hard are you willing to work to buy someone else a Veyron?

By the way I forgot to mention at the time that I was featured in Professional Photographer magazine last November, in an article about microstock. I'd written several times on the subject (here, here and here) so the reporter interviewed me to represent the "against" side of the argument.