If you want remain thin, take the cheese out of your burger

Posted by Russell Glenister on September 26, 2011

Before I get into what this is all about I would like to apologize for not posting a new article for some time. I've been on a health drive, doing a lot of running. To take it to it's final conclusion, it almost was for me, I decided to run one of those strong man races.

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iStockphoto and the butterfly effect

Posted by Russell Glenister on May 6, 2011

Most of us seem to feel our iPhones can run our lives but I may be taking it too far? I was following up on a recent interview with Kelly Thompson at iStocks Feast debate and party, held at the Getty Gallery 4th May, and thought I’d use a free Dictaphone app to record our session. Now to be honest, it was noisy in Spud You Like, or wherever we were drinking our Potato Lattes, but that’s no excuse for me only getting 30 seconds of speech on my machine.

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Kelly Thompson gets Goose Bumps
Russell Glenister exclusively interviews COO of iStock

Posted on April 26, 2011

There has been a lot of doom and gloom in the World economy recently - there still is - how has this impacted your start to the year? Things have certainly picked up from the economic lows of 2008. Today sales are very much inline with our expectations

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No such thing as a free lunch

Posted by Russell Glenister on December 9, 2010

An old friend, who, although she will remain nameless, runs a stock photography cross media company based in London, once told me about a phone call she got from her then Lawyer. He asked her for lunch. Nothing unusual about that although there was when she received, post lunch, a £1,000 invoice for time spent at said lunch.

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Laugh at iStock? Me? Never

Posted by Russell Glenister on October 11, 2010

I must admit to telling a lie, not for the first time but a lie all the same. I have spent the past couple of weeks, not just chuckling, but belly laughing at the mess iStock have got themselves into.

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Is it the end for high-end stock photography production?

Posted by Marianne Winther on September 1, 2010

I asked three stock industry stalwarts, what they think will happen to expensive shoots. High-end production: Is it dead, or just sleeping? After all we haven’t seen any or much of it for a while now...

Here are the answers they gave.

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Surely it must be time microstock agencies grew up?

Posted by Russell Glenister on August 1, 2010

At Which Stock Agency, we often enjoy looking at highly amusing descriptions we find on microstock sites. We’ve had so much fun doing it we thought it might be an idea to share some examples with our image buying public.

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The Lunatics are finally leaving the asylum
Top Microstock earners realise there may be trouble ahead

Posted by Russell Glenister on June 9, 2010

Both Yuri Gellar and his sidekick Andres Turner have been at CEPIC making known their ever so important views of bending things and losing millions on property ventures and of course Microstock, which happens to be their common interest.

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Cash for Clunkers
Veer offer cash incentive to microstock shooters

Posted by Charlie Adams on May 19, 2010

When I first heard that Veer were planning give cash to microstock contributors, just for supplying images, I thought I had misheard. That was not the case. At the highest level Veer are planning give $1.40 for every accepted image and there is no upper limit, so they are serious.

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Boutique stock agencies, winners or sinners?

Posted by Carol Stapleton, our resident Art buyer on March 2, 2010

When researching the latest in our ‘best of’ series, Boutique Photo Agencies, we really struggled, at first anyway. That’s not to say we struggled to find agencies that term themselves as boutique, or indeed that can be classed in this category. What we really struggled with was, a clearly defined set of quality characteristics.

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Is it the end between Microstock v Royalty Free? Are they now best of friends?

by Carla Locke, our woman under the conference table, on January 26, 2010

I can’t say I am surprised by the Veer announcing (see full posting at bottom) that they are now bringing Microstock in from the cold, giving it a nice hot drink and asking it to go out and save the planet for Bill Gates’ image business, who own Corbis, who happen to own Veer. So, why is Veer merging Royalty Free with Microstock? As they relayed online to their contributors,

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It really does pay to shop around

by Russell Glenister on January 17, 2010

Do you have time to shop around? If not, you should make time, as you could save over $350 per image purchased, that is, if you know where to look.

Take this average business image as an example; what do you think its worth? Do you believe $50 for a 6mb file, would be fair? What about $16 for a 11.8mb file? Yes, that would be better.

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Can cheap stock imagery, supplied as Microstock, be good for buyers?

by Russell Glenister on January 16, 2010

This is the kind of question one might ask, why ask? There is reason to this questions supposed madness, believe me.

Firstly, do cheap images really offer good value?
Well yes, they can. However, if my knowledge of economics has taught me anything, it is that the production of cheap goods (images) comes at a cost. So in the case of stock photography, if the producer and reseller are both to make a profit this probably requires, either, low costs or very high unit sales, ideally both...&.."test"..'test

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