11 May 2010 This Month in Microstock – April 2010

The microstock market marched forward in April. Lots of technology development in services and agency features. The agency strategy of paying for accepted contributors saw a return, with more to come in the near future. The traditional stock photo market also inched closer to microstock with Corbis introducing cheap web & mobile options and Vivozoom recruiting Tony Stone.

Tony Stone at Vivozoom

Some say he’s the true founder of Getty Images, but however he’s described, Tony Stone’s move to re-enter the market with his former Getty colleagues at new microstock agency Vivozoom caused much commentary in the market.

iStock Turned Ten

While the microstock business model isn’t technically ten years old yet, iStockphoto is and celebrated in typical style.

iStockalypse Cannes

Part of the aforementioned celebrations, iStockphoto ran their largest yet iStockalypse event in Cannes, France to coincide with the World Photography Festival. The lightbox of photos from the event is just getting started but you can check out the early results here. Giorgio Fochesato has some great photos of the event on his blog here and here.

Corbis Follows with Low Price Options

Identical to the Getty Images move last year, Corbis has introduced cheaper licenses for small sized version of their photos. The move is designed to slow market share loss as usage moves away from print and further into digital and online publishing.

Pixmac Visual Similarity Tool

The young and innovative microstock agency, Pixmac, introduced a more scientific version of ‘similarity’ searches available at most top microstock agencies. The system analyzes image contents to produce a list of photos with similar content and composition, rather than relying on keywords or other metrics like existing systems.

New LookStat Analytics Beta

LookStat released a beta preview of some very useful new features in their analytics tools, including analysis of RPI, Sell Through Rate, and even Return on Investment (ROI)! Each of these metrics can be applied portfolio-wide and to individual collections. The new terminology is explained on the LookStat blog along with the usual insights into what’s selling. Pricing for the new advanced functionality was also announced and explained in a separate blog post.

iSyndica Turns One

Celebrating its first year of operation, iSyndica gifted members a week of free distribution (May 1 – 7) for new files and a 30% discount on new subscriptions.

iSyndica Picks Up after Fotomind Closure

In an innovative and welcome move, iSyndica stepped in to pick up the contributor debt and portfolios after the closure of little-known microstock agency Fotomind. Contributors were able to easily move their Fotomind portfolio over to iSyndica, ready to be distributed to iSyndica’s 35 supported agencies. Any outstanding commissions below the payout threshold was equaled in iSyndica credits.

picNiche Image Deck

Robert Davies launched the most ambitious addition to his picNiche suite of microstock tools yet with the picNiche Image Deck beta. An add-on to the existing add-on for Firefox, the Image Deck automates the submission of photos at Fotolia, Dreamstime and Shutterstock. By taking metadata (Title, Keywords and Description), category and release information before upload, the information is automatically populated in the image submit pages at each of these three agencies. More agencies will be added shortly. Check out Robert’s Image Deck blog post for more details

Polylooks and Zoonar Partnership

Polylooks has always been limited by it’s legal status, limiting it from accepting images from contributors outside Europe. Not so for fellow German agency Zoonar, who launched a creative partnership with Polylooks to boost contributions from outside Europe.

Upload your content to Zoonar with the option to distribute through Polylooks active, and your account will be credited with €0.15 per accepted image. Photos are subsequently available for sale on both Zoonar and Polylooks with payments from both credited to your Zoonar account. The offer is valid for the first 200,000 images accepted. See the Zoonar landing page for details.