Who Is Yuri Arcurs?

Anyone who has heard the term microstock has probably heard of Yuri Arcurs. He is recognized as the worlds most successful microstock photographer but is much more than just a photographer.

He is a brilliant businessman adept at marketing, self-promotion and managing a large staff. He runs a production company with a full-time staff of about 30 and another 20 part-timers who work at least 10 hours a week. Included as part of his staff are four or five other photographers who actively shoot and whose work is marketed under the Yuri Arcurs brand.

Currently, Yuri Arcurs Media Inc. has about 34,000 unique microstock images marketed through many Web sites. His team is adding about 11,000 new images to his microstock collection annually. About 1,300 of the team’s images are downloaded (licensed) from iStockphoto every business day, and a total of about 5,000 per day are downloaded from all the microstock sites that represent his work. Gross annual revenue of this company is in excess of $1.5 million.

The team operates out of a huge studio (see guided tour) in Arhus, Denmark, and is building a second studio. Arcurs is also setting up a small operation in Miami and may expand the production operation to Cape Town, South Africa, in 2011.

This fall, he plans to launch the Yuri Arcurs Image Collection to sell images by subscription directly to customers on arcurs.com. The site will be focused entirely on images of people in business and lifestyle situation and will only have images that are produced and wholly owned by Yuri Arcurs Media. Pricing details are not fixed, but current thinking is that for approximately $100 a month subscribers will get access to the entire collection. The initial goal is to build a customer base of at least 1,000 within two years.

Arcurs also plans to expand heavily into video and audio and start mass production of these products in a few months. By early 2011, he expects to be able to offer customers 10,000 audio files, 50,000 subscription images and 5,000 video files directly from his site.

Target customers for his site are those loyal buyers who already use a large number of Yuri’s images. They will get images at a lower price than purchasing them through the other sites that represent his work. When they need something else, they will go to those other sites. “The whole idea is to provide customers with a solution that is slightly cheaper, but still not undermining my collection on other sites, and instead of getting $0.35 per image downloaded, keep the entire subscription fee,” Yuri said.

Despite his obvious success, Arcurs recently commented on Ellen Boughn’s blog that the return per image for “microstock non-exclusive has dropped from $9.80 per image per month two years ago to $4.50 today. I am expecting it to drop to less than $3.00 this year, at which point it does not make much sense to be producing. I could produce and make money if the return per image remains stable at $3.00, but not if it keeps going down. Right now, I have to produce 11,000 images per year to ‘maintain’ my income.”

On his blog, John Lund said: “That is, to me, a pretty stunning comment…and not a very uplifting one either.  Here is a photographer who is generally acknowledged as the premier microstock shooter in the world, and in my opinion is one of the world’s premier stock shooters of any business model, and he is anticipating his profit dipping to a point where it isn’t worth his time to produce! Yikes!”

In addition, Arcurs’ return per image is higher than what others are able to achieve. Only those producing images of people in business and lifestyle situations have a chance at his numbers, and the images must at least match the quality of Arcurs’ work. Another important factor is age of the collection: only those who have built a significant quantity of images early and have already achieved a high number of downloads have a chance at such sales. Arcurs estimates that 20% of his iStock sales come from images that are four years old.

Microstock sites give customers the option of searching by downloads, or the number of times an image has been purchased. According to Arcurs, 80% to 90% of the time, customers search by download. This brings the images that have been used most often to the top of the search return order, and these tend to be what the next customer buys. Customers have the option of organizing search returns in other ways. In fact, search by download is never the default, but customers do not seem to choose those other options. Rather than wanting something new and different—what most photographers would like to see them buy—most customers are happy to use the same pictures others have used.

Arcurs is also selling images at traditional royalty-free and rights-managed prices. He has about 6,000 images in Fotolia’s Infinite Collection. Uses of these images are priced 10 times higher than regular microstock based on file size. The default is to integrate some of the Infinite images into the normal search return order, or customers have the choice of restricting the search to the Infinite Collection alone. Despite the price tag, Arcurs says his average monthly return per image from the Infinite Collection is between $1 and $2, possibly less. Arcurs’ problem with this model is that the images are exclusive to the Infinite Collection and cannot be distributed through other traditional royalty-free outlets.

Within the next 6 to 8 months, Arcurs expects to produce about 10,000 new images for the traditional royalty-free Cultura and Tetra collections as a way of expanding and diversifying his income. He also has some 40 to 50 images in the Getty Images rights-managed offering and has made one $1,200 sale but says it is too early to determine if this will be a productive way to market his images.

Arcurs says he finds it much harder to produce images that sell well in the higher priced rights-managed category than in royalty-free. “Traditional agencies keep asking for something unique, different, not stylistically clean for their rights-managed collections. They want to do something more artistic and push their photographers to produce funky, branding images. Customers may like to look at such images for inspiration, but the kind of images they tend to buy are the simple, straightforward images found in microstock,” he explains.

Many photographers say they just do not want to shoot microstock-style imagery. That is their choice, but they should not get upset if they cannot make a living doing what they want to do because customers want something different from what photographers are willing to deliver.

In an article where Arcurs discusses what is in demand for macro, he says: “The return per image in the higher priced collections is about the same as in a micro-priced collection, but if you misunderstand what to send where, it will be much lower.”

Recently, Shutterstock announced that since it began operations in 2003, it had licensed rights to more than 125 million images. In excess of 2% of these, or more than 2.5 million downloads, were of Arcurs’ images.

Arcurs reminds me of Jerry Kennelly, the former owner of Stockbyte, whom I first met at a CEPIC conference about a decade ago. Kennelly’s company was already successful, but he told me how much his royalty-free business was going to grow, and I just could not believe it. Every time I saw him after that, his business had grown more than what he had predicted, and his new predictions grew even wilder. In 2006, Jerry sold Stockbyte to Getty Images for $135 million—two months after Getty purchased iStockphoto and just before microstock started to cannibalize traditional royalty-free licensing. Arcurs seems to have the same gifts and to be at the right place at the right time.