Last week I closed my post with the mention that two items had caused me to wonder about the possibilities of future changes in the microstock business. First there was Tony Stone entering the market with his statement that he would help Vivozoom ‘focus on the most relevant images” and then an announcement from Microstock Israel that it would concentrate on images of life in Israel and the Middle East.
Stock photographers have been developing niches and specialties since the camera was invented. Many independent photo agencies, in the past, were known for a niche or specialty. If a picture researcher wanted a photo of a historical event, she/he went to the Bettmann Archive; for current events to Black Star or Magnum; for access to National Geographic photographers to Woodfin Camp; for science to PhotoResearchers; for lifestyle to Image Bank or the Stock Market. Several of these collections still thrive but some are closed or the brand and its culture lost to the uber-brands of Getty or Corbis.
Instead of contacting independent, specialized companies, today’s image buyers rely on keyword search and hope to find relevant content. But since few editors/keyworders or executives in the large RF/RM portals have expertise in niche fields, important images within a specialized field can go astray. They are lost in the vast middle of an online collection because the keywords don’t identify the key aspects of a technical subject or do so inaccurately. Since niche collections have a niche group of buyers, the images are not downloaded as much as more popular themes like business or families. Thus they don’t license as often and are often dropped because of it. A lot of specialized visual knowledge has been lost to the industry with consolidation. (Nevertheless keyword accuracy and relevant search are much more likely in one of the traditional companies than at any of the microstock sites.)
According to Selling Stock (subscription required) textbook publishers are still afraid of microstock images because they can’t trust the captions/keywords. Jim Pickerell writes, “The percentage of micro uses continues to grow, despite the complaints of editors that often the caption information on microstock images is not detailed enough and its accuracy cannot always be trusted.”
In microstock, photos of a technical nature or of specific plants, animals or locations are lost into the middle no man’s land in search because the keywords are even less apt to be correct than in the traditional companies. The volume of images hitting the micro sites daily make it very difficult to check for accuracy or to add keywords to technical subjects. A perfect example of data that is key to many users is the scientific name associated with plants and animals. Or as I found, even the common name can be wrong.
I searched for ‘platypus’ on Shutterstock, iStockphoto and Dreamstime. One site returned a bald eagle against a flag, another several spiny anteaters and another several different species of fish. At least I could see why a spiny anteater was included since both the platypus and spiny anteaters are the only mammals that lay eggs but that wouldn’t matter a bit if I included an anteater in an educational program and called it a platypus. “So what?” I can hear you think. Who cares when photos of people jumping on trampolines outsell platypus images thousands to one? Answer: Teacher’s care, students need to know, publishers will walk away if there is even a hint of inaccuracy in an image. Photos are tools of communication. Public communication has an obligation to be correct no matter how obscure the subject.
Does it matter that if you were looking for a platypus in a microstock collection, you could think it referred to an eagle, a duck, a fish or a lizard? If you are putting out a science book, you’d better be certain that what you see is what you want!
Dreamstime has made efforts to establish special collections that have been ‘curated’ by Dreamstime members. These often subject oriented groups of images can be helpful but there is still the lingering worry that the person that assembled the collection may not have any particular knowledge about the images besides the thought that the photos are ‘nice’.
Shouldn’t the case be made for specialty microstock companies that are staffed with reviewers that are versed in the subject? Either within a brand or as stand-alone companies? Would the costs be too high? How about a medical collection reviewed by starving medical students? Or collections that are assembled by others with specialized knowledge? Or Like Israelis who know their land, its places, its religions and its businesses? iStock has taken a step toward the Tony Stone philosophy that only the relevant should survive in the creation of the Vetta Collection.
As a former biology teacher who wrote educational materials and worked on science based exhibitions and books that required absolute confidence in the information associated with the photography that I selected, I believe that curated and specialty microstock collections could be an important next step in the business. What do you think?
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I agree with you that the keywords should be accurate and reflect correctly the image. However, I would assume that any self respecting publisher of scientific books, will have editors with science degrees on their payroll. The example you gave proves that DT is right to self “police” the keywording. In this time and age, with Interent available to anybody that is a microstock contributor, there is no excuse for a badly keyworded picture.
Always a pleasure to read your blog entries.
Ellen, I commented about niches on my weblog for a specific reason. Your post makes all the sense in the world, if you look at the history of weblogs themselves. Weblogs started out as narrow geek/programmer oriented oddities; when the weblog services came online, a rush of what I call ‘generalist’ webloggers came in. Noone really knew what the medium was good for. After a couple (few?) years, when weblog posting began to garner ROI, there was a rush to specialties, niches. Noone reads generalists anymore; this function is fulfilled by Google Reader and hitting multifarious news sites for current info. But specialists, niches … this is where the market is strongest, where ‘personal brand’ has become the byword, and plays into our fascination with the social media. Look at Strobist. Who’d have thought, ten years ago, that a guy who loves flash photography could create a weblog and turn it into a cottage industry based on ‘just’ flash? That success just blew me away. What an excellent use of a weblog to serve what was previously considered a small specialist niche … and turns out to be popular as all get-out.
For your microstock niche concepts, I see the same opportunity. I have a term for this kind of thing, I’ve used for years: self-selecting subgroups (or self-categorizing specialists). You can easily see groups of people with similar likes/hobbies/specialties form their own social networks online. In that same vein, it is very simple to do this same sort of thing for microstock. Creating your own stock photo presence on the internet is not brain surgery these days. Photoshelter has their ‘virtual agency’ features that do this. It’s drop-dead simple to create your own specialist royalty-free microstock setup for groups of photographers.
Yet why aren’t there more? Why isn’t anyone shaking the world with their excellence? I wonder. I believe it’s the difficulties in *finding* good microstock specialty sources. I stumble across good ones every now and then, attached to individual photographer sites, but without optimal SEO. Can’t find them with anything but a *very* specific search term. It’s maddening. I dislike the whole SEO voodoo, but for stock photographers, they have an urgent need to be found.
For any given photo buyer, it’s a question of time and money. They have to be able to find what they’re looking for, quickly and efficiently. Google, no matter how big they get, is still not a good solution by itself. We’ve all spent fruitless hours trying to find pertinent material, to no avail.
I think there’s an opening here for not only niche microstock setups, but also for specialist ‘aggregators.’ Enthusiasts who, for instance, publicly rate all the available microstock services for keyword accuracy and image quality. As we go to political aggregation sites (sites that cull news from many different voices and present the best in simple-to-consume format), we need more photography aggregation sites.
Imagine, if you will, a photo buyer going to Google, and searching for “Best Science Microstock Sites”, and hitting a website that has no frills, but simply a list of science microstock offerings from different agencies and photographers, rated by keyword accuracy and image quality? This is what photo buyers would want, I think.
Do the search: http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=Best+Science+Microstock+Sites
There’s nothing there of any worth in that SERP. This is just a flavor of the size of the opportunity. Think of the ad impressions one could garner, that could help pay for the effort.
Keywords. I think keywords have become like blogrolls were in the early days of weblogging.
Blogrolls were the lists of other webloggers you checked out, and some sites created columns on each side of their weblogs, filling them with blog links. This habit grew ridiculously because weblog rating services gave you a higher ‘popular’ rating if you had more links. Some weblogs became unreadable, for all the chaff. Ultimately, blogrolls became a completely useless measure. Everyone was gaming them. The raters eventually dropped the measurement, and the blogroll habit died a well-deserved death.
Keywords strike me this way. When I dive into a microstock site, and enter a keyword, I come up with some real hash. Useless image searches. I’m amazed at the long lists of keywords for the most mundane shots. Everyone wants a sale, so they pile up any and all keywords in order to come up in more searches. It is in the microstock agencies’ best interests to police keywords. The agencies have to reward good keyword behavior, and punish the bad. For real specialist niches, however, the terminology of the niche itself points towards niche microstock agencies.
A smaller, independent niche microstock site could really hone down the keywords, make them SEO friendly, discursively serving their market … but I still think the issue is FINDING those great smaller specialist microstock agencies. Clearing house/aggregator sites need to be developed at the same time as the smaller microstock agencies appear.
The photo buyer eyes need to be led to those aggregation sites. This happened naturally with weblogs as niches popped up, but not as fast or efficiently as one would want. Perhaps it will happen naturally in this case, but it would be nice if someone purposely went out and filled the niche … like, yesterday!
I’m skeptical that niche microstock photo agencies will work. You’ve acknowledged that the volume will be much lower than for a typical generic microstock image. At current microstock prices, even at extended license levels, I don’t think the volume will be great enough to keep the agencies operating.
For the specialized images where captions are critical customers will need to stick to traditional macro agencies and pay traditional prices. However, I’m not sure that even the macro agencies will be able to sustain themselves for long as both the volume and prices of such sales continue to decline.
The marco agencies used to have strong businesses because they also sold these same excellently captioned and identified images to lots of other users who really didn’t care about the details. Those customers just wanted a pretty image. Now, all those sales have disappeared and gone to microstock at a fraction of the price customers used to pay. Thus, today, niche macro agencies are having trouble licensing rights to enough units to cover their costs, despite their higher prices. Most of the agencies that are still operating are making it because they have developed deep collections over the years when sales were more robust. They continue to sell that imagery that’s been in the files for a while and only add a small percentage of new imagery to the collections. This enables them to keep their overhead lower than it would be for a new agency just starting out.
A microstock seller trying to start from scratch to duplicate the collections these macro agencies have will have huge upfront costs in hiring curators with the expertise needed to edit work submitted, distinguish a platypus from an anteater and attach the correct scientific name to each image. Then, if they are going to sell the images at microstock prices, they will have to sell a lot more than the macro agencies sell now in order to earn the same amount of money.
This can only work if there is an increased demand for imagery that is clearly and carefully identified. I don’t think that will be the case. Such imagery is in demand by the textbook and education industry. At best, this industry’s demand will remain flat. There are good indications that demand for printed books, and the still images used in them, will decline as there is a growth in the use of electronic resources in education. While some still images will continue to be needed in this new electronic educational format it seems likely that there will be a much greater demand for video and less for stills than is currently the case.
There is one exception to my theory. If curators are willing to do all this work for the “love of it” rather than reasonable monetary compensation for their time invested then maybe it can work. After all, there are thousands of photographers out there who are not only spending time taking great pictures, but hours on the computer keywording and learning the intricacies of the microstock business in hopes of selling their pictures of a platypus, an endangered insect, or a medical process. Only a very small percentage of these photographers ever see a significant economic return for their efforts. The microstock photographer who are doing well are the ones producing generic images, not images of niche subject matter.
I like your reference to “starving medical students”. If the microstock agencies can find enough starving curators who are willing to work hard while they continue to starve then niche microstock could work. The microstock pricing strategy works for generic, high demand subject matter. I don’t think it will work for specialist material.
I needed to show my biology class a slide of onion cells last week, and couldn’t quickly find what I wanted on google. Instead I made my own and took a picture, hoping time spent will be useful for future lessons. I’ve just checked out istock and found this portfolio:
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_search.php?action=file&lightboxID=4001593
It covers many of the microscopy basics, and although there’s room to add more potential best-sellers (Hydra, leaf sections etc) the dls are few and I don’t see justification for the cost of technical expertise and equipment required. Unless it’s a spin-off from a hobby or job, as Jim says – for the love of it. In which case it’s an earner for the agencies but not the photographers. I don’t think I’d invest my time or expertise with photomicroscopy for microstock.
In microstock the sellers for science would most likely be the dumbed down themes: “genetic engineering” = good/bad; “global warming” = bad. Or perhaps health orientated graphics that could appeal to a wide market: a 3D body could be used by drug companies, health insurance and text books.
You could make a similar case for the boutique libraries and I’m tempted to compare, say, monsoon images with photocase. I’m not sure how valid that is, just that I like the images at both. As a photographer I’d expect few dls at photocase, and at the price per image I won’t get the long term fees needed to keep shooting that genre.
Whether it’s a handshake or a Paramecium, the photographer needs to cover his living costs. If buyers want rare subjects covered well (with subtelty and depth) they’ll need to pay more. If not, it’s not worth the effort on the part of the producer and the content won’t be there.
Thanks for all the comments. Nice to get two sides of the story. I think I have to side with the science teacher, Don. But still hoping that as more and more pubs have to turn to inexpensive images that the suppliers find a way to provide more accurate and dependable captions and keywords.
“I’m skeptical that niche microstock photo agencies will work. You’ve acknowledged that the volume will be much lower than for a typical generic microstock image. At current microstock prices, even at extended license levels, I don’t think the volume will be great enough to keep the agencies operating.”
I absolutely agree with Jim. Something specialized at micro prices just can’t justify the costs associated with being so specialized. From what I read on the Alamy forums, textbook RM prices drop and drop and return below micro pricing in some cases.
Speaking of “special”, for all their claims about specializing in Israel and religion, a searches like family or business at http://www.microstock.co.il turn up plenty of old favorites from the same old big independent players, as usual. The site is just another micro start-up, ready to fade away before the year is out.
I opened my browser, typed the two keywords ‘platypus stock’ and was instantly rewarded with pages of platypus’, platypuses and platipi (take your pick on the spelling). I then performed another search with deliberately misspelled keywords and and lo and behold, I got even more platypuses. I then typed the keywords ‘Ornithorhynchus anatinus stock’ and wow, up came lots of playpuses. If fact, I found it impossible not to get results.
I then repeated this exercise on Don’s ‘difficult’ onion cells and was instantly rewarded with pages and pages of images of — guess what — exceptionally high quality images of onion cells.
This repeatable experiment suggests that the problem lies not with keywording but with unbelievably unintelligent use of the browser.
I did the same excercise using Firefox…lots of pages…(but no usable photos) when using Google images. But the article wasn’t about the general availability of photos of a platypus but of how unreliable keywords can be in microstock.
Ellen, I agree with the descriptions and keywords beeing much more reliable at niche agencies. I found your blog as I was googling for “microstock israel”. I myself am co-founder of a microstock agency specialized in Israel and jewish-themed images: http://www.kosherstock.com.
We founded kosherstock because we love photography and have a passion and great interest in the holy land. Starting a stock agency is not necessarily a matter of business and profit. It can be a matter of passion. Of course we expect their will be enough sales. At least enough to keep our contributors uploading.
Thank you Ellen and all commenters for sharing your thoughts.
Yakov
“iStock has taken a step toward the Tony Stone philosophy that only the relevant should survive in the creation of the Vetta Collection.”
Unfortunately, many images in the Vetta collection are really badly keyworded. One of the Vetta admins is a very ‘loose’ keyworder (to put it politely). JJRD has stated on the iStock forums that there will be no attempt made to double-check Vetta images for keyword accuracy.