The Microstock Blog

Looking at the Microstock Industry

The King is Dead! Long Live The King.

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I’m going through my financials for this year and there is a very disturbing trend…  Sales on Pond5 are slowly dying.  My overall sales for this year are down from last year. Even worse, my August payout is the worst payout I’ve had since January of 2010.  Now part of that can be attributed to the fact that I’ve pissed some people off at Pond5 and they’re messing with my sales. I’ve been really hard on them for not keeping promises and in a couple of cases, just out right lying.  So of course, they’ve gone in an messed with the rankings of my stuff.

But, I hang out online with a group of other Microstock geeks, some of whom are the best sellers across the industry.  And they too are reporting (privately) that their sales on Pond5 are down considerably.

It’s like the site is on auto-pilot while the folks from Pond5 are out on a very extended vacation. The only real update this year is that Pond5 now allows uploads of still images, something they promised us over a year ago.  None of their other promised features have see the light of day, nor do they even talk about them any more.  I’ve hinted at this before, but now I’m beginning to firmly believe Pond5 is for sale. That has to be the only reasonable explanation for no real updates in nearly 2 years, stopping nearly all conversation with contributors and allowing Shutterstock to stage a major comeback into a position of dominance after thoroughly crushing them (and the rest of the competition) a couple years ago.

We’ll see how things play out the rest of the year… traditionally sales begin to pick up the middle of August with September being one of the best sales months of the year. While I’m see that trend already on Shutterstock, Pond5 sales are still lackluster and I’m no longer hopeful.

Finally! Pond5 allows direct photo uploads.

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It’s been over a year since Pond5 announced they were adding photos.  They started out with importing millions of photos from 123rf.com in a partnership and promised that we’d “soon” be able to directly upload and submit photos.

Finally, they’ve opened up submissions. But is it too late?  By importing photos from 123rf.com, they gave up any control over the photo marketplace they might have had.  123rf.com has set the pricing on Pond5 and flooded the marketplace there so that anything we upload will be inconsequential. A “drop in the ocean” as the saying goes.

They announced on the forums that they are allowing uploads of JPG and PNG files, however their “submission guidelines” claim that they only support JPG uploads.  In the past they’ve also said they would support vectors and PSD files, so we’ll see if and when that happens.

Pond5 releases Adobe Premiere Plugin

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Pond5 finally did something this year…  Still no updates on their web site, but they created a plugin for Adobe Premiere CS6 users that allows them to browse/search for stock footage from within their Premiere projects.  If they can roll it out to a lot of users, it should make Pond5 the premiere choice for buying stock footage, music and sound FX.

Check out this video on how it works:

Long slow year, mostly…

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Stock Footage DataIt’s mostly been a long slow year for my MicroStock portfolio.  My Pond5 sales are down by 30% from same month sales last year. I know there’s a lot of infighting on the Pond5 forums about pricing, but when I slugged through the numbers I found a direct correlation between my poor sales performance on Pond5 and my having raised my prices there a year ago.  I’ve lowered my prices back to where they were and we’ll see how things go for the rest of the year.  Of course, we’re headed into the summer slump, so I’m not expecting anything radical until September.

RevoStock fell off the edge of the earth.  And Craig can complain all he wants, but I’m hearing it from every single one of my friends who sell there.  Footage sales are WAY DOWN.  It’s like they totally gave up or all their footage customers left for greener pastures.  They’re doing a big anniversary sale there right now, but it doesn’t appear to be doing any good.  It’s too bad because, as I mentioned in a previous article, RevoStock is one of the “good guys” in MicroStock and they really do deserve to be successful.

Shutterstock is my anomaly.  Sales continue to grow there even though my portfolio is small at the moment and growing slowly.  Tom Spota, who took over the footage area of Shutterstock, has been extremely aggressive in growing their share of market sales.  He’s personally contacted the big players (even a little player like me) and has overseen an overhaul of the submission process as well as aggressively marketing Shutterstock Footage to buyers.  With the near complete lack of anything new on Pond5 in over a year, I fully expect Shutterstock to overtake Pond5 as #1 in footage sales by the end of 2013… unless Pond5 gets off their butts and gets back to communicating with artists and updating features on their site.

A look back at 2011

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With the sad death of iSyndica, it’s just too difficult to pull together the small details in numbers for 2011.  But the overall numbers show a growth in sales for me, which is a good thing.

But there’s a bit of bad news mixed in with the good.  Sales on Catooh have dropped dramatically in 2011… by over 50% in fact. I mostly attribute that to a jump in the number of submitters to the site and my slow growing portfolio there.  Most of my best selling clips are 3 years old or so and I uploaded very few new clips last year.

Pond5 was up over 2010 sales, but sales started to drop near the end of 2011 and so far in 2012 they’ve been dismal. I added less than 500 new clips in 2011, but Pond5 nearly doubled it’s overall portfolio size last year. So my clips are a tiny droplet in the “Ocean” that is Pond5. Of course, it also probably didn’t help that Pond5 went on auto-pilot in 2011 with almost no new features and they slashed their advertising budget.

RevoStock sales overall were down from 2010.  There was a minor surge in November and December, but it dropped back to a trickle after the new year started. A very pleasant surprise was ClipCanvas which really took off in 2010. It was a nice replacement for lost sales at RevoStock and in fact last year ClipCanvas tripled the amount I’ve earned from Revo lifetime. I have a couple friends who aren’t doing as well on ClipCanvas, but I think it’s only a matter of time for them. Things have slowed down a bit since the start of February, but I’m hopeful for another great year there.

Sales at iStock were dismal in 2011 and after 6 consecutive months of zero sales plus all the “stuff” that happened there, I decided to close my account and pull my tiny portfolio there.  The submit process was extremely difficult and it took 3 to 5 months to get anything accepted.  A couple of my friends are still selling there, but they report sales are way down from last year and the year before.

ShutterStock was the big surprise last year.  Sales trickled the first half of the year, but late in the year SS decided they were tired of having their ass kicked in sales by Pond5. They hired a new person to take over the footage side of ShutterStock who immediately got aggressive.  As a result sales on my relatively small portfolio there jumped dramatically. We’re talking several hundred percent. It was a very welcome source of revenue at the end of the year and in January of this year.  Sales have dropped off since mid February, but I’m hopeful it’s just a tax season thing (which appears to be affecting every microstock agency this time of year every year).

I got really side-tracked on trying to start a full-time photography studio business and didn’t shoot much for microstock last year.  I did manage to shoot about 600 to 800 new clips, but I only got around to editing and submitting about half of them. My photo studio isn’t working out and I closed it a few weeks ago.  So, I’m working hard on getting back into the swing of microstock and my goal is to double my online portfolio this year with at least 1500 new clips submitted.