Micro Stock Agencies 2

This image has nothing to do with Micro Stock Photography but this is a photography site and I need to post an image so here is my image. A friend of mine helps manage bands and this is one of his clients, Starfield. I had the privilege of going to the concert and shooting, so I wanted to post an image from the concert today. They were very good and I would recommend the concert to you if they happen to be in your area.

Now for the title of this blog post, Micro Stock Agencies 2. I have posted another article about Micro stock agencies a while ago and told you I would share more info with you as I learned more. I recently started selling stock photography on iStock and have been a little disheartened with the idea of micro stock photography. More recently I decided to try other micro agencies to compare them and that is what I wanted to talk about tonight. Each of the micro stock sites are different in the way that they function. Some are much easier to use than others and some are more user friendly than others. Let me start with iStock I am most familiar with it. iStock is far from user friendly it has taken me 8 months to get to the point that I am today. They give you little information and expect you to learn from your mistakes or to use their open forums to gain advice and education. I have learned quite a bit from the forums but like any forums on the web you get both good and bad information and have to sift through and filter the info and determine what is correct. It works but it truly takes a lot of effort on your part to figure things out. iStock definitely has the traffic of image buyers but they are at the lower end of the royalties they pay to the seller. Snapvillage is the next one I know a little bit about, they are much more user friendly and they have more information posted on their site to help when you are trying to figure something out. They are also better on the royalties than iStock but they have much less buyer traffic. StockXpert is another I have tried to use but they are less user friendly than iStock and helpful information is even harder to find. They also have a forum for use but I have not tried it for information yet. The problem that has me stuck at the moment is how to upload a model release with and image, I have not been able to figure out how to do it yet and I cannot find any information on how to do it. I have not tried to hard but it should be obvious but it isn't. I am not impressed with the usability of StockXpert but their royalty payments are better than iStock, however if you cannot figure out how to upload properly then you will never be able to take part in the higher royalties. I am also not sure what kind of buyer traffic they have. The last agency I have tried to use is Fotolia, and so far I am least impressed by them. I submitted 1 image to them so far. I decided that I would submit the image I have had the most success with on iStock and it was rejected. Worst of all there was no real explanation of why, just a long list of things that may have been wrong with the image. The message said to find out what may be wrong with the image log onto the forum and submit the image to the users for critique. The only problem with that is you get different opinions and unless the person giving you the opinion knows what they are talking about you may trying things to get the image accepted that are not helping it. So I am least impressed with Fotolia than any of them. I plan to stick with iStock as my main agency and keep slowly uploading to the others and see what happens. What I have learned is that iStock is not the biggest micro stock agency at least not in the size of their library. Fotolia has the larger library at almost 5 million images and iStock at just over 4 million. If I can ever get any images accepted to their library I will know if they have the buyer that iStock has. Until then I will not know for sure who is truly the bigger and better stock site.

Photoman

Photoman