Ron Chapple And Microstock

Posted on 10/12/2007 by Jim Pickerell | Printable Version | Comments (1)

For 25 years Ron Chapple has been one of the world's leading stock photographers, always on the cutting edge of the next trend. In the 1990s he was the top seller of RM imagery for FPG, a major stock photo agency of that period. After Getty Images purchased FPG, Ron established Thinkstock, an RF production company. In 2004 he sold Thinkstock to Jupitermedia for more than $4 million. While still producing RM and traditional RF, he recently became an aggressive producer of microstock.

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Copyright © 2007 Jim Pickerell. The above article may not be copied, reproduced, excerpted or distributed in any manner without written permission from the author. All requests should be submitted to Selling Stock at 10319 Westlake Drive, Suite 162, Bethesda, MD 20817, phone 301-461-7627, e-mail: wvz@fpcubgbf.pbz

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Comments

Jim Pickerell Posted Oct 16, 2007
Ron's comments about istock are very interesting. His observations are entirely true. Any agency with upload limits is in some way displaying a failure in the logistics involved in handling the image material supplied by their contributors. iStocks inspectors were working for free about a year ago; the only earning was a community status as "inspector - admin" on their profile and appearing in the forums. I do not know if this is still the case today, but it seems like it.

I can understand and somewhat appreciate low levels of approval and the necessity for a tight acceptance ratio, but having upload limits is the same as saying: "we cannot accommodate the growth of microstock material available". Other agencies "can" accommodate and are gaining from iStock's lack of inspectors. I estimate that agencies like Fotolia and Shutterstock have close to 400,000 pictures that are "exclusive" with these agencies because the contributors have been unable to offer them for iStock's consideration due to the upload limit. This is ironic considering the emphasis iStock puts on being exclusive with it alone and not submitting anywhere else.

Why would they do this? It is like Amazon.com suddenly saying, "sorry you already bought two books this month, you have to wait till next month to buy more."

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