A Piece of Macrostock Becomes Midstock
Posted by Lee Torrens
Today, Jim Pickerell published an article in his online newsletter, Selling-Stock, about Getty Images slicing off a portion of its portfolio to sell in the midstock pricing range.
According to the article, 100,000 royalty free photos will be removed from the bulging Getty portfolio to be sold under the Valueline brand at punchstock.com. The photos were all created prior to December 2005 and are drawn from various collections that Getty Images owns or markets for the photographers.
Prices start at US$19 for a small web-sized image. All other sizes are US$49. This places them firmly in the midstock range – lower than macrostock prices that generally start around US$300, but higher than microstock prices will typically peak at US$10.
Pickerell also cites a failure of Getty Images to convert microstock buyers to their full-price products. Getty have now owned iStockphoto, the most successful microstock agency, for 18 months.
Full details: “Getty to launch Valueline“, Selling-Stock.
Posted August 28th, 2007 by Lee Torrens
I had a look at Punchstock, just out of interest. Aside from the web site not actually working properly, the images I saw, priced as Mid-Stock were no better and in many cases inferior to the quality I’ve seen at the MicroStock Agencies.
If that is all PunchStock and its partners can offer at those prices, I fear that Mid-Stock and probably Macro-Stock will be completely replaced by MicroStock in the fullness of time.
These observation relate only to RF images of course.
mid-stock is a tough market imho. where is the justification given by Getty for what makes a photo midstock? i’d like to know that.
Hey guys, I thought I would pipe in. LuckyOliver coined the term midstock 4 months ago as a way to differentiate our offering and drive the industry forward. Midstock will not be replaced by microstock… this is where the industry is headed.
Another point to remember is that microstock, midstock and macrostock are not price points- they’re business models that have different ways of selling at price points. I wrote about this on our blog:
http://www.luckyoliver.com/blog/242/microstock_vs_midstock
Bryan Zmijewski
Chief Instigator
LuckyOliver
look to me like getty just be scramblin