As at every beginning of the year, MicroStockGroup founder Tyler Olson has launched his annual independent microstock survey. For the 7th year, the annual survey tries to draw conclusions about the industry and its development based on the numbers hundreds of contributors are providing on an anonymous basis. Last Years Results of the Microstock Survey In 2013, almost 800 contributors took part in the survey. It is the best source to get broad insights into a market that covers small hobbyist contributors as well as professional companies. We highly recommend any and every stock contributor to take part in that…
Author: Amos Struck
Amos Struck
I write about the stock photo and microstock industry since 2006 on my several online-magazines. My goal for MyStockPhoto is to teach photographers and stock photographers how to sell more photos and earn money with their photography hobby.
Be quick! MyStockPhoto is proud to present our first Webinar with stock footage millionaire Robb Crocker. This Sunday, we will host a webinar for all those interested in shooting footage for stock, and turn your time most efficiently into money. Space is limited to 100 attendants (40 seats left), register now! Oh, and did we say: It’s completely free! We also would like to thank our media partner MicrostockGroup, which helped to promote our first webinar. Who should be attending this Stock Footage Webinar? Stock photographers looking for additional income Professional videographers who want to add an income stream to their contract work Robb…
When you follow the news on photography topics, you will have run across the “monkey selfie” story that went viral – twice – a few months ago. And yes, we have run the story ourselves, echoing the general media. But the case is by far not as decided as the headlines had suggested. Let’s tell the story in short: British award winning wildlife photographer David Slater had travelled to Indonesia to take images of the local wildlife and nature as he used to. The crested black macaque is an endangered species, so Slater went to take pictures of those wonderful creatures. The curious…
The news of the day has been that Adobe announced its plan to acquire Fotolia for $800 million dollar in cash (more here on Stock Photo Secrets). The agreement is expected to close in the first quarter of 2015, and Adobe has already announced that it wants to integrate the Fotolia offer into its Creative Cloud. We want to take a look how this is going to affect contributors in this post. The background of the acquisition Adobe has been the de facto standard for the design workflow with Photoshop and Illustrator as its main products. For the last years, Adobe…
UPDATE: The Giveaway is over! Head to StockPerformer to grab a free month! MyStockPhoto is proud to announce our holiday giveaway contest: Win 6 months of full analytics on the premium stock photo analytics service StockPerformer! Enter the contest now to find out which of your images sell best and how to shoot more efficient. As we found in our review of StockPerformer, the option to analyze all aspects of your stock photography success (and failures) can help you easily to pay for the cost of the software. But even better: With our contest, you can get all of the analytics for free! Valued…
One of the biggest advantages that made microstock so popular over the traditional stock agencies was the availability of real-time sales information. It allowed contributors to not only check their daily income quickly but – probably even more important – gave instant and constant feedback to what customers liked, what sold, what made the best return. And then focus on their most successful strategies to produce new content. The kind of information needed for this kind of analysis and planning was rather easy to handle when there was one agency selling images within one collection. It became more and more complicated when…
iStock to be Absorbed into Getty iStock has been operating as a separate business unit in the Getty Images family since its acquisition last 2006. All of iStock’s customers and contributors have been tied to a Calgary-based company, iStockphoto LP. However, over the past few years, Getty has been taking steps to integrate and operate with its other acquisitions as a unified business. Some of the benefits of this move are increased cross-selling to customers, increased cross-placement of content and a more efficient business resulting in an increase investment in customer-facing improvements. And they are now ready to incorporate iStock…
Microstock Business: How Much Can You Earn? Just recently, Stockperformer, the leading analytics for photographers, published a Business Plan Calculator that would quickly analyse what strategy options are available for your business plans. What are some of these business plans? With more and more photographers venturing into microstock, the industry has been a bit crowded and the competition has grown fiercer. Newcomers may need to come up with simple business plans to get into microstock. There are four important questions you need to ask yourself before you begin your microstock adventure: How many images can you produce each month? How…
Coversplash Coversplash allows photographers to design their own websites by choosing from any of their elegant templates and start uploading. The website combines the features of photo sharing sites like Flickr and 500px where you can also sell licenses from your own website like Photoshelter and at the same time customize your online portfolio with features and designs like Tumblr. The images in the users’ portfolio can be linked with a personalized URL and also through social media sites like Facebook, Google+, Twitter or Pinterest. Also, just like social media sites, photographers can also connect with each other and follow…
An Exclusive Talk with Robb Crocker Shutterstock in partnership with ProductionHUB conducted an exclusive free event in their Empire State Building office last October 23 featuring videographer and the author of Stock Footage Millionaire, Robb Crocker. Robb is based in Portland, Oregon and he produced and directed commercials for popular brands like Nike, Microsoft and HP before starting stock footage. From a single $2 sale in 2007, Robb together with his team built Uberstock, a library of high-quality HD video stock footage with more than 70,000 purchases, about $7 million in revenue and over $2.7 million in royalties. At the…