Special Issue
Yuri’s everyday work. In fact, there are some 1,000 photo images
uploaded under the name of Yuri Arcurs and it takes a team to
cope with this amount of work, and there is a certain business
plan for every working day of this team to live up to.
The most important thing with microstocks is to make a
start. They are designed in such a way that anyone quickly becomes part of the community and starts receiving dividends, to
say nothing of the euphoria from having sold your first photographs!
This is a reliable business for you. The result, your revenues,
will be stable and in direct proportion to your work. Everything
is fair and honest. After learning how to work with microstocks,
you can create your own team of specialists, become wellknown in the world like Yuri Arcurs and dictate your rules on
the photo market.
So which microstock should you choose? I would recommend using only top-rated ones with millions of regular customers.
The first large microstock was iStockphoto established by
the founders of one of the largest macrostocks Getty Images in
2000. Started as a free photo library, iStockphoto later turned
into a business comparable to the macro business of its founders.
Founded in 2013, Shutterstock became the most favourite
for all photographers. It offers the most convenient interface,
the most stable incomes, but also the toughest photo selection
criteria. Shutterstock reviewers are the most demanding, but
also the promptest to review submitted images. Shutterstock
316 sales worth $187
388 sales worth $241
1 sale worth $97
is the present-day leader of the market with capitalization exceeding $1.8 billion. Shutterstock boasts much better statistics
of photo sales than all its existing competitors.
Fotolia. Another easy-to-use photo bank, recommended
for all newcomers. Fotolia is one of the top five microstocks.
Established in 2004, Fotolia initially could not boast high sales
statistics, however thanks to intelligent marketing efforts and
a series of partner agreements the microstock has significantly
increased sales.
Dreamstime. One of the first microstocks created in 2000,
with an easy registration procedure and non-discriminatory image quality requirements. Stable sales, pleasant to use.
BigStockPhoto and 123RF are humble-revenue photo
banks, whose major advantage is a convenient image search
engine and simple image quality requirements. A quite high
image acceptance ratio, but good sales start only if the photographer’s image portfolio is big enough. BigStockPhoto is currently owned by Shutterstock.
DepositPhotos was founded in 2009 by a Ukrainian startup
of Dmitry Sergeev, who entered the market with an aggressive
policy aimed at luring photographers with non-discriminatory
image reviews, a convenient interface and instant payments for
image downloads. Today DepositPhotos has accumulated an image base of 30 million photos, which is comparable to those of
the market leaders.
One should start by looking through the base of images
available on microstocks, check with reference to your selected
criteria and keywords whether you have images similar or better and more interesting than those that are available in the
base. Also check out image quality and post-processing acceptable for the microstock, analyze consumer demand.
Making a good image is not enough. One should develop
a concept that will sell.
The new one-Larastok.
For a start, you need to make three simple steps:
1. Prepare you photograph (do the post-processing, remove
dust spots, adjust colours and contrast).
2. Upload the photo to the macrostock base with the help of
convenient uploaders.
3. Add description, keywords and choose image category
(if a photograph contains images of people, a model release is
necessary).
Some microstocks arrange for registration tests, which are
not quite hard to pass, if you have basic photographic skills.
Shutterstock offers the toughest test with a requirement to upload the first 10 test images for sale. If they accept 7 of them,
you will get full access to the full functionality of Shutterstock.
Otherwise you will have to wait a month to have another try.
Therefore, you should make serious preparations for the test.
It is also important to make a correct selection of keywords
and provide a description of your photographs, as this is the
only way for customers to find your particular image among 40
million photographs.
Today there are software solutions to assist the contributor
in post-processing images and simultaneously uploading them
to all the most popular microstocks at once (Prostockmaster,
Octopusmicrostock, Stockuploader). Unfortunately, the majority of such program are commercial software, but they are worth
the money spent, as they are remarkable time-saving instruments.
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