Traditional stock photography sellers constantly struggle to improve their collections and search. Diverse collections are added to the offering to increase customer choice. Then portals revert to tighter editing, limiting the number of images returned on each search. When portals use this strategy, the rejected images often turn up on other portals and customers often buy the rejected images.
Many traditional stock sellers are trying to determine how to enter the microstock market. Microstock companies have identified hundreds of thousands of customers. Traditional sellers have resisted this market, due to the low fees per use. But the number of sales is becoming hard to ignore.
The major portals are editing many of the third-party collections, dropping images and limiting what they could add. They now refuse to accept some of the brands they had previously encouraged to produce. All this has meant more images for microstock.
Several photo brands are rumored to be quietly offering their collections to selected buyers, but so far there seems to be very little interest from the buyer side.
In the last few years, the stock photo industry has experienced significant consolidation. The chart below lists 34 existing companies that have acquired a total of 197 agencies. In general, fewer large companies are controlling the industry as middle-sized and small companies disappear.
Big money is being spent for pictures of celebrities, but how much is going to the image creators?
Microstock cannibalization of traditional RF is occurring at a faster pace than I predicted in an earlier article "Royalty Free Trends At Getty." Getty has confirmed that iStockphoto earned $22 million in 2006 and $72 million in 2007.
Dreamstime has entered into an exclusive partnership with the Korean agency ImageClick to make professional-quality images available to the Korean market at microstock prices. ImageClick will launch its exclusive brand (www.i22.com) that will make it possible for Korean visitors to search the content in their native language.
CEPIC [Coordination of European Picture Agencies (Press, Stock, Heritage)] has launched its first comprehensive survey of the stock photo industry since 2000. Alan Smith, CEPIC president, says it, "will help picture businesses to know their market environment more profoundly and to learn how to respond to the current challenges."