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 much will it cost you to produce one image?
- What are your monthly fixed costs?
- For how many months do you want to commit to your production schedule?
Your Revenue per Image per Month (RPI/m)
The next important thing to consider your revenue per image per month or how much you can expect to make from each file you produce on average month.
According to this blog post, “The revenue per image per month is defined by the amount of money all your images produce each month, on average. For example, if you have 500 images online and they produce $1000 each month, then you have a revenue per image per month (RPI/m) of $2. You must take an average value, so if they produce $1200 one month and $800 the next, then you have $1000 average on those two months.”
Producing huge quantities of poor quality images with lots of similar will have a low revenue but if you produce high quality images on high demand subjects, then you’ll likely have high revenue per image per month.
Go ahead and find out how good your business plans are working for you: https://www.stockperformer.com/calculator
The same blog post on Microstockgroup used the new Business Plan Calculator to look at three main strategies focusing on producing lifestyle photography.
- Setting up a microstock factory
- Solo photographer working full time
- Amateur photographer shooting in his/her free time
If you are interested in knowing what these strategies look like and how they help you get into microstock, head on to Microstockgroup Blog. You might want to check out Michael's thoughts on the calculator.
Most Downloaded Images on Dreamstime
Dreamstime – with thousands of images uploaded each day from contributors around the world, has put together 10 of the most downloaded images on the stock agency.
To check the images, go to http://www.dreamstime.com/10-most-downloaded-images-on-dreamstime-colldet23716
Jonathan Klein at the Web Summit 2014 about Getty Embed
Jonathan Klein, CEO of Getty Images, took part in this year’s Web Summit in Dublin. The Web Summit is a technology-industry conference that started in 2010. It is centred on internet technology and the audience are CEOs and founders of start-ups together with a range of people across global technology industry and related industries.
This year’s summit was held for three days starting November 6, 2014. Among the attendees was Getty Images’ CEO, Jonathan Klein.
Jonathan talked about how Getty started in 1995, from being an analogue business into digital, where customers from the past wait for about seven weeks from the time they order the images until they receive it on prints and to the present where only a single click can take them to a gallery of thousands of media content.
Getty Images was the first stock agency to invest in the online platform and although they had many achievements, there were also disruptive issues among the agency. Among these is the constant use if images without permission, posting Getty’s images on blogs and social media without attribution and stripped of their metadata.
Getty knows that it can’t control the amount of infringement online so they made way to put a legal method in place for that to happen and that actually benefits the content owners: the Getty Embed. With the embed player, anyone with a blog or a WordPress account can now select and embed any of Getty’s 35 million photographs, as long as the images are not used for commercial purposes. The embedded image will be free of watermark but will bear the name of the photographer and the link to the collection, plus the Getty Images logo.
With this feature, Getty Images hopes to retain control over its media content while making it easier for it to be shared and discovered.
To know what Jonathan Klein has to say about Getty Embed and the constant disruption of images, watch the video here.
Removal of Bing Widget Saves Microsoft
Earlier in August, Microsoft launched a beta version of a new service called Bing Image Widget which allows embedding of images supplied by Microsoft’s Bing Image Search on websites. When used, the Bing Image Widget would search the internet for any content Microsoft could find, whether the photos are free or not.
This sparked the concern of the PACA members specifically ASMP and CEPIC that this widget could be used to replace legitimate licensing. Getty Images, who had also launched an embed tool that promotes responsible image sharing filed a motion seeking preliminary injunction against Microsoft. That very same day, Microsoft immediately disabled the Widget and later communicated to Getty Images that Microsoft was willing to “commit to not re-launching the Widget during the pendency of the lawsuit except as redesigned to display public domain or licensed images.”
Due to Microsoft’s disabling of the Widget temporarily until the pending copyright infringement action is decided, the Southern District of New York denied Getty’s motion seeking preliminary injunction against the other party. But this does not mean that the case is dismissed. Rather, the Court decided that Getty Images did not meet the requirements for obtaining preliminary injunction because Microsoft had already discontinued use of Widget on its own.
As of the current, Microsoft has no intention of re-launching the Bing Widget in the future.
