Over the last four years, we’ve tracked Ron Chapple’s odyssey with microstock beginning with this story. Ron has been a very successful professional photographer for more than 30 years, and has always been one of the first to embrace new business opportunities. At the beginning of 2009, and again at the beginning of 2010, we talked with Ron to see how his microstock business was progressing.
On December 4, 2010 John Lund published an interview with Ron Chapple—a must-read for anyone interested in a career in photography. In response to Lund’s question about microstock, Chapple said: “My studio had early success with microstock through our iofoto collection. While this 17,000-image collection continues to provide revenue, the numbers have dropped over 50% in the last 18 months. While some of this might be a result of the economy, I believe that most of the revenue downturn is from the overabundance of images. When we started, most micro sites only had a million images. Now those same sites have over 10 million images! The statistical chance of making a sale has decreased by 90%. Three years ago, in 2007, we made the tough decision to eliminate our in-house retouching staff, to selectively produce images at lower costs, and to outsource the workflow. All of our cost reduction measures were to no avail. Revenues continue to drop, and microstock is no longer profitable for our business.
“With ‘change’ being our studio mantra and discovering that microstock was not sustainable in the long term, we looked for new opportunities. As a caveat, we did make the decision to redirect our revenues to a new business instead of marketing our iofoto images. Perhaps if we had been more diligent, we could have propped up our microstock revenues for a longer time.”
Chapple has always been very open in explaining his business strategies. The entire series of articles are well worth reviewing for those with a long-term goal of earning a living as photographers.