In addition to credits-based pricing, traditional sellers need to consider several technological adaptations. These include letting customers organize search results, helping photographers with research, providing a more varied offering and speeding up royalty payments.
Let customers organize search results
Traditional distributors should provide customers with choices in the way search results are delivered, rather than forcing them to use the agency’s system. There is nothing wrong with defaulting to the agency’s preferred image-return order, but it seems short-sighted to not offer customers the variety of options they get from microstock sellers.
Particularly useful is the ability to display images in the order of most sales: many customers like to see the images others have used. This gives them the benefit of seeing the editing decisions that real buyers—not the agency’s own editors—have made. Some sellers argue that customers only want new images and images no one else has used, but the number of times some of the best-selling images on the microstock sites have been downloaded demonstrates this to be a fallacy.
Traditional sellers may be embarrassed to reveal how few times their best sellers have sold compared to microstock best sellers, but they do not have to reveal the number of times the image has sold, just that it has sold more than others in the collection. In cases where several images have sold the same number of times, the newest in that group could be shown first. Such a search algorithm is simple to develop. It is difficult to understand why traditional distributors have not adopted this feature as a way of providing better customer service.
Aid photographer research
Being able to look at images that have sold not only helps customers, but also helps photographers when planning new shoots. Currently, photographers selling through traditional agencies must guess at what is actually selling or look at what is selling on microstock sites and hope that demand in the two environments is comparable. Photographers get no direct feedback from traditional customers. This is exacerbated by the fact that most traditional agencies have cut their editing and photographer support staffs that used to provide top photographers with guidance as to what is in demand.
Those who argue against this strategy say that if everyone knows what is selling, everyone will copy those pictures rather than producing something new and different. Some of this certainly happens in both the microstock and traditional arenas, but perhaps not as much among traditional shooters. Still, since a lot of people who are producing pictures do not pay attention to this data and shoot what most inspires them, there is still plenty of diversity. In fact, it could be argued that there is more diversity in microstock than in most big traditional collections.
Provide a more varied and eclectic offering
Traditional sellers should be developing technological ways to accept images from a more varied group of sellers (particularly advanced amateurs), and to have less stringent editing criteria, in order to produce a broader collection. (I am now ducking while everyone throws brickbats.)
More and more of the images available in the traditional environment are being produced by production companies. These companies carefully analyze what is selling and concentrate on producing images that are in high demand. As a result, there is a great oversupply of high-demand subjects, causing those trying to earn their living from stock photography to narrow their focus even more, consequently increasing this oversupply.
To broaden the collections, more niche subject matter is needed. Yet the niche subjects, no matter how well produced, do not sell frequently enough to support a photographer shooting on speculation. For the most part, people who produce niche material are amateurs or part-timers. Traditional agencies want prolific producers and tend not to accept niche photographers or their imagery. As a result, microstock agencies are becoming the place to find such images.
There are certainly problems with the microstock system for selecting images, but on the whole—with the exception of Alamy—photographers have a much better chance of getting their images accepted by a microstock distributor than a traditional one. Some argue that this results in a collection of images of lower quality. I do not agree, and there certainly is a greater variety of vision in microstock than on traditional sites, because images are accepted from a more diverse group of shooters.
Speed photographer payments
Traditional sites need to copy microstock in the way it lets suppliers know, at any given moment, how much they are owed. In addition, provided the supplier is owed at least $100, he should be able to request payment at any time. This works with a credits-based system, because the money is in the account the instant the image is delivered. While more complicated for a hybrid account that receives money through both credits and invoice sales, it is not an impossible problem to manage.
For any individual supplier, it should be possible to receive money from credit sales instantly. Money collected from invoiced sales in a given month should be reported and available at the end of the month, not three or four months later. Sales by distributors should be available to the primary agency at the end or each month, and reported and immediately available to the supplier at the end of the following month. In today’s digital environment, there is no excuse for delaying payment as long as many traditional agencies do.