Current Status of Stock Business

I've known of few unknowns who have ever made any significant money selling over the net or through stock houses, but that's no reason not to try. Some houses are specialized, while others are generalists, and they usually require 100s of images before they'll list you. Few will see any results for a year or more, unless you really have some unique or sensational images. I'm pretty sure most successful houses maintain websites, so I'd simply contact them for info.

I don't think the fundamentals have changed. That a few large houses get a lot of the business doesn't prevent single individuals from marketing their images with better returns than they could get from those houses. Posting images on a well-designed stock photography website is considerably more useful than posting them here on photo.net, and is easier than before thanks to the availability of low-cost, high-bandwidth accounts.

Bob:

There is change taking place but that has been going on for a few years. The most visible change is that more and more individual photographers are specializing in one or a few topics. By doing this, the individual photographer can offer things the large agencies seldom can, things like great depth of coverage, expert knowledge of the topic(s) covered and so on.

I agree with previous posters in that posting your images here, or on sites similar, and hoping for sales is more or less pointless. These days professional stock photographers need to have their own websites to promote and sell their work.

If you are interested in the business of stock photography from the point of view of the independent photographer, I warmly recommend Rohn Engh's "Sell and Re-Sell Your Photos", recently published in it's fifth and updated edition. Good sites with solid info on stock photography are www.editorialphoto.com and www.photosource.com

Like any other business, stock photography can be hard and it sure takes a lot more than just the ability to produce great photography. The one single thing most stock photographers who fail lack is the knowledge of how to run a small business.

Quang-Tuan - Your site is put together well and you have some good pictures on there. Since this thread is about stock photography, hopefully it is not too intrusive to ask, but what kind of results does your site generate for you?

This year, returns per image (including print sales) are 5 to 6 times better than what my stock agency gives, the later being in the well-known ballpark of $1/image.

I'm sure the consensus would be that random postings on a site like photo.net probably won't generate any action. FWIW, I've had some luck selling material through this website:

www.NaturePhotosOnline.com

We get stock requests about once a month or so: since I specialize in underwater, they rarely apply to me, but in theory... It isn't a exactly traditional stock agency, more like a place to showcase work and occasionally sell some prints etc. I opted for this route if only because I didn't have to deal with the cost/hassle of setting up a site for myself. The obvious trade-off is paying a commission to the site owner, but to each their own.

Question for Quang-Tuan: Do you have any tips for promoting your personal web site? I'm sure that having thousands of high-quality images online, with good titles/keywords, helps drive search-engine traffic to your site. Do you market directly to photo buyers as well? I've just begun to populate my own site and I get a trickle of traffic every day, have sold a few prints, but photo editors are, of course, not knocking down my door.

I just signed up to this website and there is so much information I have been in search of; I am starting a stock photography business and I wanted to know who are photo buyers??

Katherine -

Photo buyers really are just that: anyone who buys photos. It could be editorial staff at magazines or book publishers, advertising agencies, corporate communications folks, or a wide range of others. Each will have their own idiosyncracies about what they're looking for and how they like to buy, but as you develop your business, you'll learn the most important ways to deal with them. Enjoy.

I worked as a photo researcher for TIME magazine for the last 3 years and purchased many many photos. The purchaser wants 1. subject matter to meet specifications/needs 2. price 3. delivery of high res. I usually purchased from Gettyone or Corbis, but did try to buy from individuals whenever possible. Sometimes I would get an inital contact out of a stock directory, and then research their photos further with their personal contact info (usually provided on major search engines). Sometimes the photographer would give me a quote and I would get a quote for the same photo on the stock site. In this case, I would always try to get the payment directly to the individual photographer, alhtough I highly doubt many photo buyers care enough to do this - I would just hope someone would do the same if it were me. Power to the people, not the corporations.

- Kristin G

Answer to Scott: I only "market" through search engines. Some photo editors apparently use them. There is (almost) nothing that I do which hasn't been explained in great detail by Dan Heller on his web site.

Who is Dan Heller?

Dan Heller is a photo.net veteran, and to the best of my knowledge the most successful photographer on the web so far (meaning possibly the only one making a leaving using the web as his primary business medium).

Thanks, Quang-Tuan. I figured as much. My issues regarding search engine traffic are: 1. Not enough content (yet) and 2. Can't get Google and others to index each individual photo page. Problem 1 is just a matter of time and digitizing. Problem 2 is, I'm sure, a result of having built a database-driven site which makes heavy use of query string parameters.

I found a reference somewhere which said that Google tends not to like multiple querystring parameters (i.e. multiples '&'s if you're writing ASP pages), so I rewrote my pages to use a single parameter. This didn't help. I also read that while Google will eventually visit a dynamic page linked from a static one (or one without any parameters), it doesn't like to visit any second-level dynamic links. In other words, Googlebot will follow one level of dynamic links, but no more. So, I've tried making a static site map with (dynamic) links to every image in my database to see if I could get Googlebot to index them, but it hasn't worked. Googlebot has spidered the sitemap dozens of times, but has never followed a dynamic link to any of my image pages. I'm now thinking that the actual length of my (now) single querystring parameter is making Googlebot wary. The implication could be that I have potentially hundreds of thousands of database-generated pages. My URLs now look like this: http://www.slrobertson.com/photo.asp?photo=025213-M-28. That ?photo=025213-M-28 business is what I suspect is causing problems, since my gallery pages, which have a single parameter like '?slideshow_id=10', get spidered regularly.

So, I may end of having to bake my lovingly-written dynamic web site to all static pages if I really want search engines to spider my entire site. Sigh....

Using dynamically generated pages creates 4 problems:

• Search engine visiblity
• Site performance under heavy traffic (eg. photo.net)
• Higher hosting requirements
• More complex designing

I think you're right, Q.T. I originally wrote my DB-backed web site as an excerise to learn a little ASP and web-DB programming and displaying images for friends and family seemed like a good application. It has since morphed into a side business and I'm now seriously considering scrapping the dynamic pages for all the reasons you listed.

This is slightly OT from Bob's original question but Q-T and Scott, how do I get a dynamic link URL like

<a href="http://www.indospectrum.com/cgi-bin/image.pl?url=http://www.indospectrum.com/digimages/ggpark/cd018_red_pagoda_green_leaves2.jpg&comment=A Pagoda through the leaves, Japanese Tea Garden, Golden Gate Park"><img src="http://www.indospectrum.com/digimages/ggpark/cd018_red_pagoda_green_leaves2_thumb.jpg" alt="A Pagoda through the leaves, Japanese Tea Garden, Golden Gate Park"></a>

to look like

<a href="http://www.indospectrum.com/cgi-bin/digimages/ggpark/cd018_red_pagoda_green_leaves2.html> <img src="http://www.indospectrum.com/digimages/ggpark/cd018_red_pagoda_green_leaves2_thumb.jpg" alt="A Pagoda through the leaves, Japanese Tea Garden, Golden Gate Park"> </a>

Greenspun seems to have <image-name>.tcl files. Are these files generated on the fly? How do you do that on Apache?

Thanks,

Raghu

http://www.indospectrum.com

Raghu, maybe someone else will chime in, but personally I have no idea (see the point 4 of my previous post).

All my pages (6000+) are static html generated by custom scripts. Again, nothing here different from what Dan Heller does.

There is a way to get around the dynamic page problem if your web server is Apache. You can make a .htaccess file that can re-map a URL (for example, http://www.yourserver.com/025213-M-28.htm will be mapped to http://www.yourserver.com/photo.php?photo=025213-M-28). The module is called MOD_REWRITE.

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/mod/mod_rewrite.html

This works well with search engines since it appears as a static page to them. Don't know if it's available for IIS.

There are URL rewriting ISAPI filters for IIS which do pretty much the same thing as Apache's mod_rewrite, but my web host doesn't have one installed. One issue to watch out for when using a URL rewriter is directory-relative links in your dynamic pages: Since a URL like /mysite/remap/ID.100/showphoto.htm will be remapped to somthing like /mysite/showphoto.php?ID=100, any relative links in showphoto.php will break since the two URL paths are different. You have to use site-rooted links (/mysite/images/photo.jpg instead of ../images/photo.jpg, or whatever).

Yeah, I think I'm going to rebuild a static site, with galleries and slide shows generated by scripts.

Looking over my logs it looks like search engines (at least google) don't mind consuming dynamic links. Google crawls though the dynamic pages on my site frequently and seems to be indexing them. One thing that might make this easier for bots is to avoid deeply nested dynamic pages. In other words have a rather shallow depth to the site, or a least a page like a site map where most of the content is a click away.

Mod_rewrite works great. If you are lucky enough to have a server under your direct control mod_perl will let you do some pretty wild things as far as processing urls-- you can basically map anything onto anything else.

All of the pages on My Site, were hand written using basic HTML. I'm always careful to describe each page & image with as much info as I can...something like "paris-eiffel-tower"...for example. Something easy for search engines to find. And, a likely phrase that those doing the searching would type in.

Basic HTML seems like a tedious way to go, but all I do now is cut & paste now for new pages. It takes very little time.

I agree with Quang-Tuan, Dan Heller provides some very useful, and very practical information on his site. His site, along with Quang's site, are great models.

I sell 3 licenses a month, on average, along with varying amounts of print sales...they seem to come in batches. It doesn't sound like a lot, and it's not a lot of money. But at least I get to keep it all.

Before I offer my feedback, let me first say that I consider myself an amateur at photography. I'm still working with a 2 megapixel camera that I got for Christmas two years ago.

Regardless, I started posting my decent photos on IStockphoto.com back in early November. (Istockphoto is a site that sells stock photographs from various photographers.) More than financial gain, my goal was to see if I could get my daughters lovely face featured on a few web sites or advertisements.

Istockphoto pays you a pittance (I could probably find more change just walking down the street!) but that's besides the point. In the 4 months my 18 measly photos have been posted there, I've earned over $1,000.

Not from people downloading my pictures on Istockphoto (where I've not even earned $20). But because I've had companies who have wanted to license my pictures for advertisements. Just this month an ad agency in Canada used one of my photos in an ad for drug manufacturer Glaxo Smith Kline. The ad was featured in 3 different newspapers, with possibly more to come.

Yeah... one of my 2 megapixel pictures that they originally saw on Istockphoto. They came to me, and asked me for my rates. And this isn't one of those 'few and far between' opportunities. I get at least one of these every month.

I think I'm doing pretty well considering the fact that I've got an okay camera, no web site, and only 18 pictures that I'm promoting.

My point is this, if you want to sell stock, be willing to explore EVERY avenue on the web.

Get you own site, promote the heck out of it. Try Google AdWords, if you want immediate exposure on Google. Submit your work to clearinghouse sites like Istockphoto. (Once you register, you can post a link to your web site within your profile.) If you've got the skills, try the more professional sites like Istockpro.com or Corbis.

If you've got a presence in several locations, you'll be hard to miss. This is especially true if you specialize. (My niche is young people of color.)

Anyway, that's my take on the situation. I welcome feedback and questions.

Monique

Monique, Just a quick question regarding istockphoto and licensing. You said people have licensed photos that they have seen in your portfolio on istockphoto.com, but my question is why wouldn't they just download them directly from istockphoto, instead of going through you? It's much cheaper, so I don't really understand why they would come to you to pay more than just downloading from istockphoto?

Seems like a great route to take--I'm checking into them myself.

Thanks!

When I looked at the license agreement with IStockPhoto it looked like any derivative works are copyrighted by iStockPhoto. Most companies won't want iStockPhoto holding the copyright to their advertising materials.

ROYALTY FREE LICENSE "(iv) Modify or alter the Data File(s) as necessary for your use, as allowed for elsewhere in these terms and conditions, provided that the rights to any derivative work shall belong to iStockphoto. You may use such derivative work only as permitted in accordance with these terms and conditions. All copyrights with respect to such derivative work are assigned to iStockphoto or its members, which assignment the parties hereby agree is valid under the Canadian (and other International) Copyright Law. If requested by iStockphoto, you agree to execute a written assignment of any such copyrights with respect to such derivative work."

You will not get rich using stock libraries.

If they are still taking on try looking at http://www.pbphotagency.com if you join they at least send you urgent image requests that they do not have in stock.

The usual 50% is their cut of the sale.

Does anyone have a reference (online preferably and free is good too) for stock photo rates? Something based on size of photos, print run, etc. Thanks! -Naren

Alexander,

Your link does not work.?

I believe more and more in smaller agencies and to make sales ourself. When I get reports showing 0.90$ for a image then I believe that there is something wrong. Good for the agencies, but bad for photographers. I just figuered out that from one sale of one of my agencies I got the total of about 2% of the sale price. Thats how often the sale got shared through all the sub agencies. I'm quite happy now with my direct sales of stock photography. I make almost all my sales today through my website: Nature and travel stock photography. Otherwise as said, I believe in small stock agencies.