CEPIC New Media Conference: Making Millions with Microstock, One Euro at a Time (Part I)
Serban Enache – CEO Dreamstime
The first speaker of this panel was Serban Enache, Dreamstime’s CEO that presented some impressive growth data of one of the top microstock site with a strong community of users:
2007 | 2010 | ||
Users: | 350,000 (+20,000 monthly) | +585% | 2,400,000 (+100,000 monthly) |
Photographers: | 15,000 (+1,000 monthly) | +513% | 92,000 (+2,000 monthly) |
Images: | 1,300,000 | +561% | 8,700,000 |
Users online: | 2,000 | +375% | 9,500 |
Collections: | 3,842 | +124% | 8,629 |
Board threads: | 6,543 | +138% | 15,622 |
Board posts: | 54,218 | +130% | 124,848 |
The traffic site reflects this growth with 450,000 daily unique visitors (12M monthly), Alexa rank 600, Google page rank 8.
In the slide, an overview of the image prices. For the photographers, royalties range from 30% to 60%. The top country contributors are USA, UK, Russia, Ukraine, China, Canada.
The best practices for sustainable sales could be summarized:
Content
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quality
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diversity
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quantity
Metadata
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relevancy and accuracy
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diversity for similars
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avoid spam and too many keywords
Building a brand
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content
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community
Some features give a plus to the Dreamstime’s platform and community, starting from the Message Boards with a fully transparent community feedback, suggestions, debates. Users are involved in promoting the site thanks to one of the best referral program of the microstock industry, active both for buyers and contributors referred. Keymentors and Keymasters feature provides keywording services to other contributors and the Blog section is the place you can find tutorials, tips, useful links, life stories and other thoughts.
Serban also said that number of sold licenses and the related revenues are increasing every month, an optimistic view for the future of the microstock market. The most downloaded sizes of photos are Medium and Large. The price level system of Dreamstime is one of the reasons that causes rejection for submitted series of similar photos: focusing on the best ones there is a greater probability to drive them to the higher levels of price with an advantage for the agency and the photographer. More information about the Dreamstime system price on my post Dreamstime 2010 credits and levels updates
Slides courtesy of Dreamstime
3 Comments
Hi Roberto! Hope you had a nice conference, have already seen a few pictures and videos of CEPIC but none from stock photographers! Are there any videos regarding Lee, Serban, Yuri… and more?
My recent post Microstock Earnings – May 2010
Hi Luis,
I know that Tyler (microstockgroup) made some interviews and probably others… let's wait for the "develop" 🙂
My recent post CEPIC New Media Conference: Making Millions with Microstock (Part I)