Bandwagons keep on rolling long after there is really any room left to jump aboard.

I’m really quite surprised to find there are still new microstock agencies popping up. Sure it is relatively cheap and easy to throw a site up. However, it takes a lot more effort to build a worthwhile collection of images that might start enticing buyers. Microstock is not new anymore, so any new agency has to somehow differentiate itself to potential buyers who are already familiar with and buying from one or more of the top six microstock sites.

This is where most of the newer sites playing catch up are struggling; their offerings are largely duplications of what is already on offer from the established players built up by non-exclusive contributors seeing each new site as another potential outlet for their images. Potential that unfortunately is often not realised as the buyers don’t come in enough volume (microstock is all about volume). Think about it. Why would they, if there is essentially nothing new on offer?

Microstock contributors are becoming increasingly wary of investing time and energy uploading to new startups and so new agencies are resorting to using pay to upload enticements. The now departed Albumo tried this with some success in building a decent collection. It didn’t help them sell enough to survive though. Now along comes DepositPhotos, a site offering the potential to make $100 simply by uploading your images. Their Photographer Promotion Program is paying 20c per image uploaded and approved, up to 500 images. Crucially their payout minimum is $50, so there is potential to make a little bit of cash here simply by uploading your existing non-exclusive microstock images. Whether that return is worth the time and effort involved is up to individual contributors. I would suggest it is only worth the effort if the submission process is fairly painless and automatic as I suspect they may struggle to generate decent sales.

The problem with this approach is it will again create a collection that struggles to stand out from the established players. DepositPhotos pricing model is on the low side but with microstock prices there really isn’t any room to win market share with aggressive pricing, especially as the current trend is for higher prices and more ‘premium’ imagery like istockphotos vetta collection.

So can a new startup microstock agency succeed now? I don’t think it is going to be easy; we’re going to see consolidation in the next few years in my opinion and there will be fewer viable agencies. There are, however, still some areas of potential though where a new agency could grab enough of the market to be worthwhile both to its owners and contributors. What is needed is some sort of unique selling point that will attract buyers, it could be a niche focus, or a superior level of service of some kind. Vivozoom had the right idea with their image warranties which offered buyers something of real value that would have stopped some using other microstock sites. However it didn’t take long for the big boys to swipe the competition away with istock and shutterstock now also guaranteeing their images. Vivozoom now has to brand itself as the ‘first’ microstock site to guarantee its images as legally safe, which doesn’t quite have the marketing clout they enjoyed when they were the ‘only’ microstock site offering this. You can bet the same thing will happen as soon as another upstart comes up with a good usp!

Starting up a new microstock agency is still relatively easy. Building it into a viable business is going to become increasingly hard. To my mind the opportunity is only really now in building a relatively small specialised collection with content that isn’t available everywhere and that is tightly focused on a specific segment of buyers. That doesn’t sound like microstock at all does it? Welcome to the resurgence of traditional stock photography agencies!