A frequent question from professional stock photographers is: “Will hobbyists take over the market?”
Before answering this question, we must first define the concepts of “hobbyist” and “professional.” I define a professional stock photographer as one who earns his entire living from taking pictures, on speculation, and licensing rights to them. A hobbyist also licenses rights to images he creates, but looks at the revenue generated from this effort as a supplement to his primary source of income.
It is important to recognize that the labels of hobbyist or professional say nothing about the quality of the work produced. Some images produced by hobbyists or part-time stock photographers exhibit as much technical skill, craft and creativity as the best produced by professionals. At the same time, some images produced by professionals are very pedestrian.
Using these definitions we must admit that, even before the introduction of microstock, a high percentage of the images being licensed as rights-managed stock were—and remain—produced by hobbyists or part-timers. Very few photographers are able to earn their entire living by licensing rights to stock images. Most have always viewed their stock revenue as a supplement to their primary source of income.
Some will say a professional photographer is someone who earns his entire living from taking pictures. Thus, photographers who shoot weddings, events, or work on salary for a corporation and occasionally license rights to stock images would be considered “professional.” Defined this way, professionals include many very part-time stock shooters.
It should also be recognized that some who started out as part-timers move on to earning a full-time living from stock. Such transitions happen with microstock shooters as well as those supplying images to traditional outlets.
As we learn more about those selling microstock, it is becoming clear that hobbyists are not taking over the stock photo market—despite the fact that there are somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 photographers, most of them hobbyists or part-timers, supplying images to various microstock sites.
An examination of iStockphoto’s top sellers reveals that those making the most the sales are very active stock producers, not part-time shooters. Over 70% of those with images on iStock have had five or fewer downloads. They are the hobbyists. A very small percentage (less than 0.5%) of iStock photographers are producing the kind of images most people want to use. One third of all iStock sales are made by 250 photographers, while the company represents over 60,000 contributors. Many of these 250 photographers, and perhaps a few others a little further down the food chain, are professionals by most definitions—and some are making serious money.
On the other hand, if we look at rights-managed sellers represented by Getty, Corbis, Jupiterimages and others, we find that a very small percentage of them earn enough from stock alone to support themselves. Are rights-managed sellers more professional simply because they are betting their images will sell for big bucks (which seldom happens), while the microstock photographer focuses on volume?
Hobbyists are not taking over the microstock market any more than they are taking over the traditional market. There are simply many part-timers engaged in all segments of both markets.