I thought this may be of interest to those who havent read it.


What A Dollar Can Buy In Stock Photography

January 05, 2006

By Daryl Lang (PDNOnline)

This is an extended version of a story that appears in the January 2006 issue of PDN.

To supplement his income from advertising assignments, photographer Tad Denson of Mobile, Ala., posts stock images on several bargain-basement royalty-free sites that pay him as little as 20 cents on each license. It's small change, but Denson says the volume adds up to enough income to cover his monthly payments on a BMW and a Nissan SUV.

Though he can never be sure who's using his pictures, Denson has spotted his work in a mailer for Payless Shoes and on the web site for the TigerDirect.com computer store.

Denson's friends give him a hard time about licensing his images so cheaply, but he doesn't seem to mind.

"Times are changing," Denson says of the stock photo market. "I can either fight it or embrace it. And embracing it doesn't mean settling for mediocrity."

Still, that's a hard sell for the many photo pros who see cheap stock as bad business that threatens to undervalue photography.

These "micropayment" or "community-based" stock services, as they're sometimes called, don't see themselves that way. Rather than competing with established stock agencies, they say they've tapped a group of image users who never bought stock before - consumers and small businesses.

If anyone deserves the credit (or blame) for the sudden popularity of micro stock, it's iStockPhoto.com, based in Calgary, Alberta.

Founded in 2000 as a place for photographers and designers to swap images, iStockPhoto has grown into the most visited stock photography web site - outpacing even heavyweights Getty Images and Corbis, according to the Alexa traffic rankings.

Kelly Thompson, iStockPhoto's vice president of marketing, says a turning point for iStockPhoto was the dawn of inexpensive digital SLR cameras, which made it possible for photo hobbyists to shoot high-resolution pictures. The company grew by word of mouth.

"Viral marketing has really worked well for us," Thompson says. iStockPhoto provides business cards to its photographers with coupons on the back good for three free image downloads. It runs a series of traveling photo workshops called iStockalypse. And it has created a virtual photo community, where members share advice and encouragement.

Community is a big buzzword for micro stock sites. They typically offer message boards, peer feedback, charts of which images are selling best, and eBay-like ratings of the most successful photographers. Recently, iStockPhoto announced a restructuring of its pricing plan that could increase the cost of some images to as high as $40, as well as offering new licensing options. But the least expensive images will remain $1.

Following the path blazed by iStockPhoto, a handful of other dollar-an-image royalty-free companies have set up shop in the last year or two.

At Fotolia, images start out at $1 but photographers get the option of raising their prices after a certain number of sales. Dreamstime also licenses photos for $1 but offers photographers a higher percentage of sales.

Another popular community-based stock site, ShutterStock, sells subscriptions that let clients download a generous amount of pictures for $139 a month. Photographers earn 20 cents each time an image is downloaded.

"We have a worldwide network of 15,000 active photographers sending us photos every day," says ShutterStock founder and CEO Jon Oringer, who also says ShutterStock's subscription membership is growing at a rate of 30 percent a month.

Micro stock customers have raised the obvious concerns of how they can be sure the images are properly licensed and model-released, but owners of micro stock sites say they have systems in place to make sure they don't get scammed.

Fotolia president Oleg Tschetzoff says putting systems in place for legal checks, such as bank account registrations and Digimarc watermarks, was the biggest investment in creating Fotolia.

Oringer says ShutterStock caught one or two scammers before their images were licensed to anyone, and since then has required all photographers to provide a passport or submit to a credit card verification. Other micro stock sites conduct similar checks, and say they have teams of people that review every image for certain quality standards.

This still doesn't add up to the Stock Artists Alliance (SAA), a trade association that has campaigned against royalty-free stock for years and warns that dollar-an-image sites are a bad deal for photographers.

SAA executive director Betsy Reid pointed out a discussion board on iStockPhoto where members were congratulating photographer Lise Gagne, who wrote that she had just seen one of her stock images on IBM's web site.

"Once you're done celebrating, is anyone going to stop and think that you got 20 cents for that image?" Reid asks.

Gagne is a full-time photographer based in Quebec and one of iStockPhoto's shining stars. She has contributed some of the site's most popular images and frequently chats with other members in the forums. One of her pictures, a silhouette of people shaking hands over a stylized map of the world, has been downloaded more than 2,000 times.

Reached by e-mail, Gagne says she started shooting for iStockPhoto after discovering the site while working as a designer for a communications agency. She eventually left the job and began shooting stock full time. She declined to say how much she makes, but said it is enough to pay for her house, to rent a studio and to buy props and photo equipment.

Regarding her image on the IBM web site, Gagne says she's proud and honored that IBM would use one of her images.

"I don't want to have more money, it's not important, it's more important for me to see that people can appreciate my work and find it useful," she wrote by e-mail. "I'm proud of it, very proud!"

The micro stock companies make no secret of the fact that many of their photographers are just beginning to learn their way through the photo world.

"Of course all photographers are going to aspire to someone like Getty," says Thompson of iStockPhoto. "That's a pretty elite group. Most photographers are not going to be in it. ? Many of the images on our site would never see the light of day if not for us." IStockPhoto offers a higher-priced site, iStockPro, as a place for its photographers to graduate to, but Thompson says the company's contributors often find they do better on the lower-priced site.

ShutterStock's Oringer says his company is helping bring new people into the world of photography.

"We have a lot of amateur photographers who would never have gotten to the level of selling photographs," Oringer says. "We're creating stock photographers."

Heres a link to the original article http://www.pdnonline.com/pdn/feature..._id=1001806311