iStockphoto 2012: Semi-Annual Analysis

Our semi-annual analysis of iStockphoto sales has once again produced interesting results. As of January 2, 1012 istockcharts was tracking the sales of 38,163 of the more than 100,000 iStock contributors. More than 90% of the images in the iStock collection belong to this group of contributor. Combined these contributors have had a minimum of 114,875,519+ downloads since each started working with iStock. During 2011 alone a minimum of 18,615,558+ images (and probably about 21.5 million) were licensed for use.

In order to determine the actual number of images licensed (downloaded) we need to account for the plus (+) factor. iStock provides statistic on the number of downloads of each contributor, but rounds the number they make public to the nearest lower whole number. For example a contributor’s downloads may be listed at 10,000+. The actual number is somewhere between 10,000 and 10,999. When the number hits 11,000 it will be shown as 11,000+. The actual number of downloads is somewhere between the lowest and highest number in the range.

To estimate total images downloaded in 2011 we have taken the middle number in the range and multiplied it by the number of contributors in each group. This gives us an estimated total downloads of 21,503,353 for 2011.

These 38,163 contributors added about 1,817,217 images to the collection in 2011 and grew the collection by about 25% to a combined total of 9,224,159 images. (This number is in excess of 90% of the total iStockphoto collection.)

We have also tracked 195 of the leading contributors for almost three years. Of the total images in the collection 705,290 or about 7% belong to these 195 contributors. These contributors added 95,099 images in 2010 and 96,450 in 2011 and grew their collections by 37% in the last two years. They also have had 29,604,000+ downloads during their iStock careers which represent about 25% of all iStock sales.

The numbers indicate that the vast majority of contributors whose numbers are not tracked by istockcharts have placed very few images on the site. Well over 60,000 contributors have placed less than one million images on the site, or maybe an average of about 15 images each. Very few of these ever sell. In fact 6,635 of the contributors tracked by istockcharts have had fewer than 10 downloads.

Declining Sales

The last time iStockphoto publicly reported its sales figures was in 2007 when they said they had 17.55 million downloads and gross revenue of $72 million. We believe they had about 25 million downloads in 2008 and generated approximately $163 million in revenue that year. Since then the number of units licensed have been declining, but revenue has continued to rise due to price increases.

We believe the company’s gross revenue in 2011 was about $350 million. Dividing that by our estimated total downloads of 21.5 million the average license fee for an image was in the range of $16.25. The 5771 exclusive contributors (about 5% of total contributors) have been the main beneficiaries of the price increases. The prices for Exclusive, Exclusive+, Vetta and The Agency Collection (TAC) images are higher than for non-exclusive images; the royalty share is higher and the exclusive images are given preference in the search return order.

Even with these advantages many exclusive contributors are seeing declining unit sales. Of the 195 leading sellers 30 probably had more downloads in 2011 than in 2010 (check the second chart).  Another 25 had about the same number of downloads and 140 had fewer downloads in 2011 than in 2010.

195 Top Producers

For comparative information on 195 of the top producers go to http://www.photolicensingoptions.com/ViewArticle.aspx?code=JHP2540. A small fee is charged to access this information. The list shows how contributor positions on the istockcharts list have changed since May 2009 when we started tracking data.
We also provide data on the minimum and possible maximum number of downloads of each contributor in 2010 and 2011 as well as the number of images each added to the collection in those years. It is important to recognize that the images of this small group of 195 contributors represent at least 25% of all the images that have been downloaded from iStockphoto in its history.

Licensing Images In Today’s Market

I’m regularly contacted by photographers, some with excellent portfolios, wanting to know how they can license rights to their images in today’s market. Recently, I was contacted by a nature and wildlife photographer whose work was excellent. This photographer regularly conducts Photo Workshops where he teaches others how to take great scenic and wildlife pictures. Here’s what I told him.

The problem is in how to get your images where customers can see them. Two good specialist wildlife agencies in the U.S. are Animals Animals/Earth Scenes and Minden Pictures

However, today, most customers are going to large online databases to find the images they need. Among the ones that license images at RM or traditional RF prices are: Getty Images, Corbis, Alamy, Veer, Masterfile, Superstock, AGE (Spain), Marutius (Germany), Picturemaxx (Germany), and FotoSearch in the U.S. (FotoSearch doesn’t accept images from individual photographers, only agents and production companies.) In addition there are four microstock sites – iStockphoto.com, Shutterstock.com, Dreamstime.com and Fotolia.com – that you may want to consider.

Most of these major RM and RF marketers not only accept images from individual photographers but also from many smaller agencies. If you put your images with a smaller agency with a good reputation chances are that some of the images will end up in one or more of these major databases. Before signing with an agency that licenses work as RM or RF ask for the names of the distributors that represent their work. Also try to determine the percentage of the agency’s gross revenue that comes from direct sales to customers as opposed to sales made through distributors. The problem with distributor sales is that the photographer has to give up a double cut of the fee paid.

One of the first things to decide is whether you are committed to licensing your images as RM or traditional RF, or whether you are willing to accept the microstock philosophy of volume sales at much lower prices. If you license your images as RM there is a possibility of getting multi-thousand dollar sales, but such sales are very rare. The odds of making a big advertising sale in today’s market are about the same as winning the Lottery. It’s not that your images aren’t good enough to compete at that level. It’s that they will be competing against so many other reasonably good images. If you put your images in traditional RF the top price you can get is less than $1,000, but the odds of making a sale at all are about twice as good as having an image on an RM site.

I estimate that worldwide in 2010 there were about 1.5 million RM and about 3 million RF images licensed at traditional prices. During the same period over 100 million uses were licensed at microstock prices. Given the number of images available at RM and RF prices the chances of any particular image being licensed are very slim. For example, Alamy has about 27 million images in its database. Based on figures published two years ago they will probably license rights to about 200,000 individual usages in 2011. Thus, at Alamy less than one out of every 100 images are licensed in any given year.

The odds of a microstock image being licensed are much better, but the price per license will often be very low. You need to decide if you will be upset when some company uses one of your snow covered mountain scenes for a web site promoting a ski resort or selling camping equipment, and pays less than $10 for the use. If so, then you don’t want to offer the pictures for sale as microstock. But, chances are if you choose the microstock route your images will get used 75 to 100 times more frequently than would be the case if they are licensed as RM.

Today, very few photographers are earning enough from stock sales alone to support themselves. On the other hand I think there are about the same number of microstock photographers earning in excess of $75,000 a year as there are traditional RF or (RM photographers earning at that level.

Svalbard Glacier - SimpleFoto

Oversupply

You need to recognize that there is a tremendous oversupply of nature, wildlife and landscape images. (The same is true for almost every other subject matter.) Your images are certainly much better on a quality and artistic level than most of the images out there, but unfortunately that isn’t all it takes to make sales. Getting the images seen by potential customers is the big problem.

Here’s a list of the number of images in a few categories at 4 of the major distributors.

Statistics show that the vast majority of customers choose an image from those found in the first 300 reviewed in a web search. Very few look at more than a few hundred images in any category before making a decision either to buy, or go somewhere else. So the question is how do you get your images shown in that first 300. Customers can’t buy what they don’t see. At most sites the newest images uploaded play a major role in the sequence images are shown. This means that newly uploaded images have a chance of being seen in the first weeks or months after being uploaded. But it won’t be long until they are pushed down below that 300 level.

Using additional keywords to define specific aspects of an image may keep your image high in the search returns for a longer period of time – assuming some customers actually use the words you’ve inputted to search for images. Specifics don’t always help because many customers are looking for more generic images.

Algorithms Rather Than Professional Editing

Twenty years ago customers would call a picture agency for research, describe what they were looking for and the agency’s researchers would go through the files and pick a selection of images that they thought would fit the customer’s needs. The researchers got to know the best images in their collections. They would continually go back to older images they liked because they had developed a sense of what their customers wanted. New images weren’t sent out just because they were new. Now, all that personal visual judgment is gone. At the RM and traditional RF agencies the personal judgment of image quality and appropriateness of the subject matter has been replaced by computer algorithms that are heavily dependent on words.

The microstock sellers (iStockphoto, Shutterstock, et al) do offer a variety of ways for the customers to organize search returns. One is usually the number of times an image has been downloaded or purchased. There aren’t any good public figures on how frequently customers use any of the sort options, but it is believed that a significant percentage of customers sort on number of downloads when it is an option. This gives the customer the benefit of quickly seeing the images that a huge number of other customers found useful and purchased. In one sense the picture research principle is still working. But, it is now much harder for that new image that has just arrived to ever get seen unless the customer is smart enough to do a search for “newest” images as well as a separate search for most “downloads.”

Take iStockphoto for example. The top selling waterfall image has been licensed over 2,000 times; mountains, 1,500 times; domestic cats, 1,500 times; and tigers, 1400 times. I encourage you to go to iStockphoto, search for the subject matter in your collection, sort by downloads, see how many times some of the images have been downloaded and how long they have been on that site.

Look at some on the first page, but also look at the 100th and 300th image to see how quickly the number of downloads falls off. This will give you a good idea of the demand for that subject matter.

Traditional sites (RM and RF) don’t offer a variety of search options like the microstock sites do. With traditional sites the search order is pre-determined by the distributor and the customer must take-it-or-leave-it. Traditionals do use complex computer algorithms that attempt to bring certain images to the top, but often they are based on which images will generate the most revenue for the distributor (lowest royalty percentage for the creator) rather than a visual judgment of image quality and appropriateness that a good editor might make. In some cases weight is given to the number of times an image has been viewed, put in a lightbox, or licensed. Part of the problem is that the information about how the algorithms work is considered proprietary and not shared with the image suppliers.

Industry Trends

More and more customers are going to the microstock sites to find most of the images they need. Microstock prices, while still low, are going up. Price for RM images are going down as the sellers of these products try to compete with microstock. Many RM images and now being licensed for prices lower than microstock The proportional share of images licensed as RM relative to the share licensed as microstock is declining steadily.

Most of the RM companies (Alamy excepted) will want exclusive rights to the images (and similars) they accept. To maximize earnings it is important to have your images in as many different places as possible so they can be seen by the broadest possible cross section of customers. You can put the same images with multiple microstock sites plus Alamy on a non-exclusive basis.

For more information check out:

Getting Images Seen
http://www.photolicensingoptions.com/ViewArticle.aspx?code=JHP2409

2011 Stock Photo Market Size
http://www.photolicensingoptions.com/ViewArticle.aspx?code=JHP2501

Average Return from iStockphoto
http://www.photolicensingoptions.com/ViewArticle.aspx?code=JHP2486

MicrostockExpo Checklist

The MicrostockExpo in Berlin is approaching fast (4 days to go).  If you haven’t purchased your ticket, there is still time and room to join the 125+ 140+ other attendees.

And for those attending, I thought I’d put together a little check list.

Remember your Business Cards

Yes you should bring some (lots).  It isn’t even a question.  You are going to be meeting many many people in a short time span and you (nor the people you meet) will be able to remember all the names.  They may remember where you are from / which company your worked for or the style of pictures you take, and maybe the color of your hair, but not your name and certainly not your email or website.  Most everyone has cards and it is a great way to easily exchange contact information on the fly. If you don’t have any already made, you should run down to your local printer and get some printed up, or make some on a home printer and get out the sparkles and glue.  Anything is better than nothing.

Plan Who You Want to Talk To

With so many people and so little time, you’re not going to get to talk to everyone.  If you have someone you especially want to have a conversation with, make sure you set up a meeting time.  The meeting is never expected to be formal and may end up including others that happen to be ‘around’, but you’ll be sure to get in a conversation with that person you wanted to chat with.

Introduce Yourself

There will be lots of people attending the conference alone and lots of people who would like to meet you.  Even if you’re not an extrovert, walk up to people and introduce yourself.  You are guaranteed to have something in common (microstock) and you may get some fun surprises of who you ‘discover’.   Perhaps you’ll find someone you have been in discussion with on a Microstock Forum or possibly the CEO of your favorite agency.

Plan Your Day

The Microstock Expo has a packed program.  Make sure you make note of which sessions you want to attend and which you can do without.  Once you get chatting with your new friends it’s easy to loose track of the time and miss a useful session.  At the same time, if you spend the entire time in sessions there may be too little time for socializing and browsing the exhibitor booths.

Stay Connected

If you find yourself standing around, wondering what to do – check out the latest conference tweets [shortcode #mexpo] and Forum thread on MicorstockGroup.  People may be gathering in a pub / bar / coffeeshop and you’ll be invited.

Making Photography A Career: Run Your Numbers

Many who enjoy photography and have had some success at licensing rights to their images dream of quitting their “day job,” giving up a regular pay check and taking pictures full time.

Here are a few things to think about that apply both to photographers who hope to do commercial assignments and those who want to license rights to stock images.

Assignments

Fortunately, with assignments the photographer is guaranteed a fixed fee for the job before undertaking the work. The only questions are “what to charge” and “is the amount the customer is willing to pay enough?”  Nevertheless, the assignment strategy is much less risky than producing stock where the photographer does all the work and incurs all the expense, with no guarantee he will ever be paid anything.

I would like to recommend three resources for determining what to charge. They are: John Harrington’s “Best Business Practices For Photographers”, Chapters 6 thru 9; the NPPA “Cost Of Doing Business Calculator”  and the PhotoShelter free book “Starting A Photography Business.”

The first thing you need to do is keep careful track of all your business and personal expenses for a period of time. I recommend at least a year. Some say, “Why track of personal expenses.” If you are going to be in business for yourself you need to know exactly what it costs you — not some hypothetical person — to live in the style to which you have become accustomed. What do you spend for room and board? on movies? lunches? Starbucks? All the little things add up and they may be things you don’t want to do without.

In addition, when you’re working for yourself many of the business expenses may also have personal applications. It is hard to figure how much of one category you might need to allocate to business and personal. Take a car for example. You might say, I must have a car for my personal life. Therefore, it is not a business expense. But chances are you’ll also use the car to some extent for non-reimbursed business purposes and you will need to figure how much to allocate to business expenses. If you live in New York or London maybe you only uses subways and taxis, but you ought to try to figure out what portion of those trips you make for business reasons. Eventually we will add personal and business expenses together to figure what you need to earn each year.

Here’s a list of some of the business expenses you should be tracking.

• Office or Studio
• Phone (Cell, Office, Fax)
• Photo Equipment and Supplies
• Computers (Hardware & Software)
• Internet Hookup and Email
• Personal Web Site
• Advertising & Promotion
• Transportation
• Office Supplies
• Postage and Shipping
• Professional Development/Seminars
• Subscriptions & Dues
• Business Insurance (Liability)
• Legal & Accounting Services
• Taxes & Licenses (Business Property & Self-Employment)
• Office Assistants (Payroll)
• Utilities
• Travel
• Entertainment (meals with clients)
• Health Insurance
• Retirement Fund

Let’s look at a few more closely. You may work out of your home, and not need a studio. In fact, you may get a slight tax break for a home office. You may need to occasionally rent a studio. Think about that.

Photo and computer equipment and software are always difficult to estimate. You’ve already got a camera and a computer. The tendency is to think there will be no additional costs in this area. But, there will always be a need to upgrade to the next generation of hardware and software. Try to allow a generous budget in this area because you will spend it. If nothing else you will have to add storage capacity as you shoot more and more images.

What will you have to do to promote your business and reach out to customers? Will you use direct mail? What about an online portfolio, a print portfolio, one or more iPad portfolios?

Are you going to do everything yourself or will you need a part or full time assistant? Are you currently receiving health coverage through your employer? Will you need to get separate health coverage? What about retirement? You’re 25 years old. Do you really need to begin putting something away for retirement now? Yes. If you live in the U.S. you’ll get a tax deduction and you’ll definitely need some savings when it is time for retirement.

One little story. In the early 1990s when I was 55 and earning $175,000 a year from my stock photo collection I thought the revenue my stock photos would generate would be my retirement fund. Then came the Internet; dramatic technological changes in camera equipment, digital capture and an explosion of available imagery of every conceivable subject matter. Fortunately, I had the foresight to also put money into a retirement fund. If I had not, I would be in deep trouble today at age 75 if the revenue generated by my stock photography collection was my major source of retirement income.

Nobody knows how the photography business will change in the next 20 year, let alone 50 years. The only thing I can say for sure is that the imagery needs, and the way it is created will be very different from what is being produced today. Some may think, “I’ll adapt or I’ll try photography for a few years and if it doesn’t work out I’ll get into something else.” A lot of 40 and 50-year-olds will testify that making that transition isn’t all that easy.

 Looking At The Numbers

Let’s get to the numbers. Assume you’re single. After you have totaled all the numbers in the above expense categories you get a figure of $30,000 in non-billable expenses. And your personal living expenses are $25,000. You need to earn at least $55,000 in the next year.

If you are aggressively seeking work every day of the year you’ll probably be lucky if you can bill 100 assignment days a year. That means you need to charge at least $550 for each assignment day billed. If you haven’t got a track record and experience, 50 days a year, or one billing day a week, is probably a good starting goal. That means you need to average a minimum of $1,100 a day. Some days you may work for less, but that means you must get a higher fee on other days in order to make your gross revenue number.

These numbers are a starting point for establishing fees.  Photographers should remember that some jobs require more skill and creativity that others. With other jobs the photographers is required to take more risks – personal or financial. In these cases higher levels of compensation are justified. If your personal and business expenses are higher, or if the number of days per-year you can work are less, then your daily rate will need to be higher.

Photographers are often tempted to work for less than what they need to order to turn a profit. They will work to “get experience,” “build a portfolio” or for “non-profit organizations.” In such cases there are several things to remember. There are millions of non-profit organizations. Many have huge budgets and well paid employees. They often pay going rates for certain services. Why not photography? Choose carefully if you’re going to supply free pictures.

Photographers often do jobs for less than their costs believing that if they demonstrate their abilities the client will offer them work at higher prices in the future. This usually doesn’t work. That client you charge less than your costs will expect you to always work for the same low prices. The only way to get better paying jobs is find different customers and start them out at higher prices.

Some will say, “Great, I only have to work one day a week and I can earn that much.” No, you’re just getting paid for one day a week. You will be working at least 5 days, probably five long days, trying to get those jobs, marketing, lining up models, getting props, planning shoots, doing post-production computer work, delivering the end product and — worrying about where the next job will come from.

There may be some photographers with working spouses that brings in a good salary and, if they’re lucky, supply the health insurance. These photographers may be able to work for less. But there will also be people with living expenses of more than $25,000 a year who will need to earn much more.

Singles should also consider whether one day they will want to get married, have children, live in a larger house and have a better car. If so, finding a spouse with a good job may be much more important than improving their photography skills.

Stock Shooters

Stock Shooters can base their gross income calculations on what they are currently earning from stock. However, due to the huge growth in the number of images available for licensing, most shooters are finding that their number of units licensed is declining unless they are adding a huge number of new images annually. The more images you add each year the harder it is to outdo your numbers the next year. Anyone considering full time stock production needs to examine their individual trends very carefully and weight them against the averages..

Overall, RM and traditional RF shooters are seeing a decline in average license fees and a decline in the number of units licensed annually. On the other hand, many microstock shooters have seen their average price-per-image-licensed grow due to general price increases by the microstock distributors. But those prices may be reaching a level where they can’t be pushed up much more. Thus, if microstock shooters want future revenue growth they must have growth in units licensed.

Based on a July 2011 analysis of 196 of iStockphoto’s top contributors, there was an average decline of 5% to 7% in the number of images downloaded between July 1, 2010 and June 30, 2011. During this same period these same photographers added 18% more images to their collections.

Individuals committed to making photography a career may want to consider a combination of assignment work and licensing rights to stock images. In addition having skills in writing and/or graphic design don’t hurt. Being able to earn revenue in multiple ways has helped many photographers succeed.

Earnings vs Portfolio Size – Microstock Survey 2010

With this look at the results from the 2010 Microstock Survey, I’ll be specifically looking at earnings.  I’ll try to break them down a few different ways so we can learn the about how much we should expect to earn and what realistic goals can be for the future.

Earnings by Portfolio Size

Trying to determine how much you can make with 100 or 5000 files, simply by looking at graphs or comparing stats with others is extremely hard.  So much depends on your image style, which niches you shoot, originality, quality, variety etc.  From the graph it is pretty clear that the earnings are extremely varied.  That said, trends can be seen and it is always interesting to know if one is earing below or above the general trend.

Click image to zoom

On Average, microstock artists are earning $10.28/image/year or a monthly RPI of $0.87

Earnings by Exclusivity

After filtering out the responses that had a portfolio size of zero or left the earnings blank, I was left with 522 data points.  Here is a look at how iStock exclusives compare to their non-exclusive counterparts.

Raw Numbers

Non-Exclusives Respondents: 394
Avg Portfolio Size: 1,383
Median Portfolio Size: 505
Avg Earnings: USD 9,265
Median Earnings: USD 2,000

iStock Exclusive Respondents: 128
Avg Portfolio Size: 1,548
Median Portfolio Size: 1,000
Avg Earnings: USD 31,385
Median Earnings: USD 12,405

Click image to zoom

Wow!  Simply put, I’m amazed. I was expecting non-exclusive photographers to earn more than exclusive photographers, but the graph appears to show quite the opposite.

If there is any consolation for us non-exclusives, it could be that the amount of data points in the higher earnings bracket (exclusive or non) is so small it is hard to draw exact / accurate conclusions. Another explanation could be that many of those who become serious in microstock become exclusive, or that you need to have 250 downloads with a 50% acceptance ratio (500 downloads with a lower acceptance ratio) before you can become exclusive, making the contributer caliber of this segment slightly higher.

I am very happy as a non-exclusive and want to reason away what the graph is showing, but I can’t help but admit that it looks like iStock exclusives are doing less work to receive more income.  The data certainly indicates this to be true.  It will be interesting to see if this trend continues over the next few years.

Full Time vs Part Time Microstockers

Perhaps this next comparison is a little redundant but I was curious about it just the same.  I was curious to see how those artists who earn the majority of their income from microstock compare to those who earn less than 50% of their income from microstock.  I once again took out the responses that didn’t include portfolio size or gross income, which is the reason the results vary  from the previous look at full time microstock photographers.

Raw Numbers

Part Time Respondents: 403
Avg Portfolio Size: 1,089
Median Portfolio Size: 512
Avg Earnings: USD 6,774
Median Earnings: USD 2,018

Full Time Respondents: 119
Avg Portfolio Size: 2,851
Median Portfolio Size: 2,100
Avg Earnings: USD 44,667
Median Earnings: USD 20,500

Click image to zoom

The results are no surprise.  Those who earn the majority of their income from microstock are indeed earning, on average, more from microstock.  An interesting observation however, is that the jump in income appears to come from a higher RPI and not so much from a larger portfolio.

Thoughts?

So what are your thoughts.  Why are iStockers earning more than us non-exclusives?  Does this paint a dismal or positive picture of the future?

Discuss on the Microstock Forum or post your comments below.

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If you want to be notified when the 2011 survey comes out, be sure to sign up for an email.