Digital Web Logistics

I spend time looking at forum posts, reading blogs, and talking to other digital artists, I am trying to analyse the current market and look at possible scenario’s for the future direction of the microstock industry, and I can see some patterns emerging that will influence how microstock develops, the comments below are just my thoughts.

Microstock is young in the business world, at about ten years old it is just like a child that has had a growth spurt and now it is time to mature, the body of the microstock child has been bombarded during this growth with all sorts of rubbish and other changes, the parents of this child can see it has reached a point now where it is obese and it needs to detoxify, lose the fat and work harder to become much leaner.  

Microstock cannot continue in it’s present form as it will become to heavy and just unmanageable, there are already to many microstock sites which means to much dilution of the limited revenue, if they allow this trend to continue they will lose the 20% of artists that make 80% of the revenue, there are already signs that a transition is starting to take place, in the short term this transition will hurt artists but it will be a long term gain for the artists that treat microstock as a business and produce quality assets.

Microstock used crowd sourcing to inflate the libraries and get the artists to contribute, the percentages of royalties will need to fall to pay for any transition, this is because most of the libraries are a total mess and they need to do some serious housekeeping, and action a reduction in the poor assets.

Moving the buyers perspective of the service up from “bargain basement Images”, to one of a “good buyers experience with quality assets”, will mean that up to 60% of assets will need to be culled, this will also have to be a manual process so it has a large cost, there needs to be this cull to offer the buyers an experience that will keep them coming back, moving from ‘Mums Snaps’ to a “quality collection of commercial images” is the way forward if price points are to become more realistic.  

The transition is starting to take place now with a chance in policy where "uploading your snaps to microstock” is no longer an option as new contributors are finding that the established libraries are making it much harder to join and get started.

Existing artists some of which are still uploading everything including poorer assets are just be meet by more rejections, some will get disheartened and pull all their assets and this only saves the stocksite a job, there will be more rejections of good quality assets where there are to many similar assets already in the library, but the good artists that understand the business will accept the changes and will see this as a positive, there will be a natural cull of the weaker artists and a move to consolidation, making it more of a business focused industry and less attractive to new artists.

Good artist will eventually see this change and start to be more selective and only upload an asset to the higher earning sites some may even go exclusive when libraries are tighter, with the poorer artists still uploading dross to any struggling or start-up site that will take them, some of the smaller agencies will survive and do well by becoming specialised, with hand picked selected collections or niche markets, the other start-ups or agencies that think artists need another microstock modelled agency that offers nothing unique will just fold, this will also help to halt the current dilution of the revenue stream which is hurting some services and putting pressure on commission percentages.

The microstock services had to build up libraries of around 3-5 million images before they could start a cull, and it is most likely that 3 from 5 images on some sites do not even have a single sale, so removing these poor assets will leave a nice tight commercial collection easy to maintain, with the better images and cleaner more relevant search results will mean that business and prices can creep up.

This will mean that for the better remaining artists revenue will rise overall longer term, with less competition and higher prices, moving above microstock and closer to midstock traditional pricing.

So with much smaller microstock libraries of high earning images, a good customer experience will mean that the good artists revenue will increase overall despite the cuts in percentages at this growth point in the industry!

I hope you have enjoyed reading my analysis and blog and have taken something from the content to think about, I would like to hear your views so please do leave any comments.