Experiment 12: setting up your on-line microstock store

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In this article, I will be sharing my experience setting up my online stock photography store on Smugmug. For those of you who never heard about Smugmug, it was founded in 2002 as a family business and a picture and video hosting site. It has rapidly grown and is now hosting more than 700,000,000 pictures. To put it into perspective, Flickr has more than 4 billion now.
Smugmug offers three levels of membership including a Pro account which allows you to license and sell merchandise from your pictures. A lot of pro photographers are using Smugmug as a platform to sell products to their customers after a shooting session or to market their pictures.

Below is my list of the PROS and CONS having a Smugmug Pro account:


Pros

• No domain name or annual hosting fees, no website design fee ($ 149.95 annual fee all included).
• Customers do not need to register before buying your product; they just can pay by credit card.
• Friendly webpage customization (graphic themes, CSS and Javascript).
• Unlimited storage for your photos and videos.
• Password protected galleries and custom watermarks.
• Reactive customer service
• Ability to set your own prices and retain 85% commission on sales.
• No image reviews
• You can sell three sizes of digital prints (1MP, 4MP and original) but also merchandise (T-shirts, mousepads, poscards, mugs, etc….), prints (glossy, matte, metallic) and canvas (rolled, wrapped).
• Display of HD 1920x1080 videos (up to 10 minutes and 600 MB long)



Cons

• Payment only by paper check in US dollars so far … (direct deposit is coming but only for US photographers)
• You are paid monthly if your profit exceeds $500, otherwise you are paid once your balance reaches $200.
• The photo licencing agreement is not as clear as on microstock agencies and extended licences are not available.
• The website is only in English.
• There is no option to sell HD videos yet.
• And of course… you have to do the marketing yourself



Is a Smugmug pro account really for you ?

I think the first thing to consider is that if you are willing or not to promote your portfolio. If you are not ready to do that, the Pro offer is not probably for you as you cannot count to get the same volume sale of Istock for example. Also I believe you would need a quite large portfolio (more than 2000 pictures) to begin with.

How do I use my Smugmug pro account?

I uploaded more about 2500 pictures so far online. Ftp is not available but uploading via the web browser is quite fast and IPTC data are read automatically.
Since sales volume are low, I priced my pictures has the following: $20 for 1MP, $40 for 4MP and $60 for the original (10MP). I have also a macro RF section as well  as Macro RM even if I don't have an e-commerce section for the later.
Stock  pictures are organized in different galleries: people, food, architecture, transportation, nature landscape, textures and backgrounds.
I have also  a special collection of more artsy pictures which would do well on microstock and some pictures I decided to sell at a higher price and are not offered on microstock agencies.
If contacted directly by a client for a special request, I upload the product to a password protected gallery where he or she can proceed to a secure payment. You just receive a confirmation e-mail when the payment is completed.

Some tips

Smugmug provides some stats but those are quite limited. It is however possible to track your visits using Google Analytics. To do that, go to contol panel, advance site customization and copy paste the code into the head tag.
Smugmug has integrated some social network tools: you can easily share a gallery on twitter and facebook for example. Digg, Stumble Upon and MySpace are also available.
You can link your Smugmug pro account to your own domain name and it is done in few clicks when you have already a domain on godaddy.

Conclusion

Smugmug is a friendly and fast platform to share and sell your digital images. It can be a good complement to your microstock activity if you already have a client base and/or are willing to market your site. However payments for European users are not straightforward since only US dollars checks are emitted.
So far, I’ve sold one digital print (by direct contact) and one print (no direct contact) . This wouldn’t sound like much but it was enough to recover more than 50% of my Pro account cost.
More than 4000 galleries of stock images are already on Smugmug. If you want to join, you can save $5 on a Pro account by entering the following coupon during your registration: 5CnHScGMAvPuA.

You can visit my online store following this link.

Is microstock still open to hobbyst photographers ?

Competition is fierce in the microstock industry between agencies but also between photographers. In this article, I will try to answer the following questions : who is responsible of lowering or raising barriers of entry for hobbyst microstockers and is there a scope for them to make some money ?

• Camera manufacturers

Camera manufacturers played a big role in the inception of microstock business model giving access to DLSR to a large number of people. As a reminder, back in 2002, the 14MP Kodak DCS Pro14n had a price tag of  $ 4,995 ! Today, a entry level DLSR kit or a high end compact is the minimum required to get into the microstock market as a photographer and represents an investment of about  $1000.

Few full time microstockers are getting an edge using top end DSLR (Canon EOS5 MarkII 21MP, Nikon D3X 24.5 MP) or digital medium cameras (Hasselbal H3D-II-39 39MP, Phase One P65+ 65MP).

• Agencies
  

Leading agencies as Istockphoto and Shutterstock are doing an initial evaluation, like an entry exam if you prefer and it looks like that this exam  got more difficult the past few years.It is quite easy however to get into some of the new agencies as they do not have initial review but sales volume is low.

• Knowledge and time
  

A less obvious barrier of entry is the knowledge that photographers need to acquire about the microstock industry, photography and post-processing techniques. All the information is widely distributed on blogs, forums and social networks but processing this knowledge can be time consuming and time is by definition a scarce resource for hobbyst photographers….

• Internet access
  

Microstock photographers share their time between shooting, research, processing, keywording and uploading pictures. As far uploading concerned, lot of photographers are taking an initial strategy to distribute their pictures to multiple agencies (up to 20 or more) to see which ones are working for them. Beside time, uploading to multiple agencies be an issue with a slow internet access and become a barrier of entry. Some solutions came up recently to get around this issue like the Isyndica platform which allow multichannels distribution by uploading the photo once to their server.

• And now, the money side of things……
  

Even is money is not the main focus of hobbyst photographers, they can rely on it to finance new equipment. If it was possiblle few years back, you should not expect now to make a lot of money with only few hundreds of pictures on line.....

Initially microstock agencies advertised themselves as a quick money scheme: according to them you just have to upload your vacation pictures from your harddrive.

Things are certainly very different now as the quality of pictures increased considerably. Recently, some agencies took the step to promote special collections within their database (Istock Vetta, 123RF EVO, Fotolia Infinite) but getting into these collections is almost impossible for hobbysts. Agencies are usually putting some size restriction on images and we can imagine that in the near future they will list a recommended or required list of cameras like it is done already by Alamy and Getty Images.

Full time microstockers are not only improving the overall quality (technical and creative) of pictures but also producing a large quantity of pictures making it more and more difficult for hobbysts to compete. If a hobbyst can produce up to 100 pictures a month, full time photographers can produce thousands….

With a low volume of production, it looks like that that the only way to make some money is actually to produce pictures in one or more selected niches.

• Conclusion

Leading agencies and full time microstockers raised the barriers of entry for hobbysts. Even if photography equipment to get into microstock is affordable and web distributors like Isyndica exist, it appears more and more difficult for hobbyst photographers to get accepted from leading stock agencies and therefore make some money. Time and knowledge are also serious barriers of entry. However microstock is definitively a good learning experience and a chance to interact with an active and diverse community which is priceless:)

Also, every year few hobbysts made it full time and make a living out of their passion so I would say that everything is possible !

This article reflects of course my own opinion and I welcome every constructive comments!

Barriers of entry in microstock