The stock photography began around 60 years ago. At that time photographers didn't generally shoot with stock images in mind. In those days a photo shoot was generally commissioned by an organisation that wanted a particular image to fit their brand or corporate image for advertising purposes. The cost of of a photo shoot would run into thousands or even tens of thousands of pounds in today's money. More often than not, only a few images from the entire shoot would be selected for use so photographers would place the unused images in a stock library where they could be bought relatively cheaply, a couple of hundred pounds by people and companies that didn't have the budget to pay tens of thousands of pounds for large photo shoots.

This was good news for small companies that wanted high quality images and good news for photographers who could supplement their income with a few stock sales. And supplement was all it did. No one except maybe a select few made a living from stock photography. It was next to impossible for enthusiasts and amateurs to get listed with stock agencies which were often run by photographers themselves.

At that time, images were sold as rights managed (RM). This meant that they were sold for a specific use and the licence lasted a predetermined period of time, images were sold with exclusive licences which meant that once sold to someone, the image often couldn't be sold again until the licence expired. The price of the image was determined entirely by the use to which it was to be put so for example, if it was to be used for a double page spread in national newspaper, the price would be much higher than the same image used in a small run local newspaper. That's rights managed. If somebody wanted exclusive rights then the price would be increased dramatically.

Some time later, a new market emerged with a new licencing structure called Royalty Free. This method of pricing selling was much simpler because the photo had a set price regardless of how it was to be used. Even so, these pictures sold for hundreds of pounds. It's worth mentioning here that Rights Managed and Exclusive pictures are still sold today by the big players in the stock photography industry. Agencies like Corbis, Getty, Alamy etc. use all of the various licences on their images, more often than not it's the photographer that decides which licence their image is to be sold under.

Even today, it is extremely difficult for amateurs and enthusiasts to get listed with these agencies and when they do, the requirement of the library maybe to submit a minimum number of images per year in order to stay listed. This can be quite a difficult task for the the average amateur and even the enthusiast to provide the number of images needed. Furthermore, the big agencies often require exclusive rights to your images and you as the photographer. That means you can't sell your images anywhere else other than through the agency you are signed up with, even images they reject can't be sold elsewhere if you are exclusive to an agency.

In terms of earnings, using these traditional stock agencies, it has been estimated that photographers earn on average £1.00 GBP or $2.00 USD per image per year held with the agency. So it's easy to see that to make a living you need a large number of images with the agency to. For a modest income of £20,000 GBP pa or $39,000 USD you would need around 15,000 - 20,000 images. That's an awful lot of photos and something only a full time photographer could provide. In addition to that it could take 1-2 years before the money starts to come through. Not a great prospect for those wanting to earn more than that and more quickly.

At the beginning of the 21st century, we see the emergence of the upstart microstock agencies that have turned the stock industry on its head by selling high quality images at just a fraction of the prices charged by the traditional agencies, they are doing extremely well and importantly, so are the photographers. On average, photographers can make between 5 and 10 times the amount of money with microstock agencies despite the fact that the images sell for 100 times less. How can that be? Well, a quantum jump in the dynamics of supply and demand and technology have changed the face of the stock photography industry forever. There is resistance by some of the traditional agencies to this change however, some of the smarter traditional agencies have seen the future and have got in on the act. For example, one of the giants in traditional stock, Getty Images, liked the idea so much that they bought the original microstock company iStockPhoto for a reputed $50,000,000. Yes 50 million dollars! Inmagine, another giant, started their own microstock agency in the form of 123RF.

So it's all change and the biggest change of all is that the majority of contributors to these microstock agencies are amateurs and enthusiasts. People like you, people like me that wanted to make a bit of extra income from their photographic hobby, suddenly finding themselves in a position where they can realistically make good living from stock photography alone.

So just What is Microstock?