This guide is about the tools I use on a daily basis to make decisions about the distribution of my images. The concepts described here are powerful tools that enable you to get your thoughts and concerns about your stock income boiled down into precise and comparable numbers. Knowing your RPI, Half-Life and MPM is lifesaving!
Return per image (RPI)
Inventor: Tom Grill
An image’s RPI can be calculated per year or per month and is generally quoted in USD. You calculate your RPI by dividing the income you have either per year or per month with the number of images you have for sale through that distribution channel. If you have 1000 images online in microstock for example and this gives you 5000 USD per month in royalties your RPI will be calculated like this:
5000USD/1000Images = 5 RPI (USD return per image, per month.)
A RPI of 5USD per month is very high. Most people in microstock, when taking their total income from all agencies combined, have a RPI of normally 1-2 USD. A RPI is most often quoted as RPI per month and but to avoid confusion, you should write it like this RPI/year and RPI/month. RPI in traditional stock is normally a lot higher than micro, and a combination of a good photographer and a good agency should be able to produce a RPI/month of 15 or higher. In some of Getty’s collections there are rumors of RPI/month of more than 50.
Skewed/false ranking
Stock pictures will normally sell less and less because pictures will gradually start to look outdated. For example, looking at pictures from the 80s and you can almost always tell, the hair, the clothes, etc. People in the future looking back at the pictures being taken now will feel the same, and would probably be hesitating to buy such pictures. Now when you see a search display on a stock agency, the first page almost always is a show-off of very popular images. The search engine ranking is based on an automatic feature based on the amount of clicks, views and downloads this image has. So when pictures become naturally outdated they get less clicks, views and downloads and therefore go backwards in the ranking. A picture that was once very popular will gradually get placed further and further back in the search ranking. This is the normal case, but sometimes agencies use parameters to push curtain images forward or change the search result ranking. This is know as skewed or “false ranking”. For example, if I was the CEO of a stock agency and I had just launched a new collection of images alongside my other images, it would be tempting to push these images a little forward in the search results so they become more visible and therefore sell more. This would give the impression that this new collection was and is a great success and it would be easy to convince photographers and agencies to give their material to this collection. Being a photographer contributing to a collection that is falsely pushed forward can be very profitable. However, it can also be very dangerous if the CEO stops favoring your collection as your income will drop immediately to the generic level (not pushed forward). It is rumored that some Getty photographers experienced this a couple of years ago and went from making 30,000USD+ per month to 3,000-4,000USD+ per month. Skewed collections are not necessarily bad, but if they represent a large portion or all of your income, then you should be very careful.
The most familiar skewed rankings are:
- Freshness ranking. Ultrahigh priority on new images. Shutterstock is the most known example, where you can go up in income by 100-200 percent by uploading a new batch of images about 10% of the size of your total portfolio. This boost of income lasts about a week and then you are virtually back to status quo.
- Oldness handicap. Giving old pictures a handicap counter that pushes them backwards before they naturally get outdated. This keeps the search display fresh and filled with new images but the old images will almost never sell. iStock is speculated to do this. On iStock, images more than a year old are almost invisible in the default search ranking.
- Collection ranking. Giving a curtain collection of images a higher rank than other images.
- Inspector rating ranking. A lot of agencies operate with an inspector ranking system that marks a picture and gives it a preference in the search queue ranking. Agencies like Crestock, Dreamstime and Fotolia are public about this ranking.
- Photographer success ranking. Based on the success of the photographer the images are pushed forward. This system is currently only used by Alamy.
- Title/description skew. If an agency has problems with getting accurate and flawless search displays, they sometimes do something drastic: include the title and description to have weight in the ranking. This means that if I search for “fun” the images that have this keyword will appear, but the images that has “fun” in their title and description will be ranked much higher. The reason this ranking system is “desperate” is because photographers don’t put in titles so they contain keywords. They put in titles so they are titles, like “a wonderful day” or “I need a new job”. So instead of letting the keywords have weight they base their ranking on an assumption: that in general, people will have titles with important keywords in them. Dreamstime, Fotolia and Luckyoliver are the only agencies operating with this kind of ranking, and it is highly unpopular among photographers.
- Branding. If you are good at branding yourself, this will give you more views, clicks and downloads than other users and skew the normal buying patterns to your advantage. Branding is extremely difficult in microstock, and requires a lot of forum activity, interviews, writing tutorials, doing blogs or just simply being visible. In the most extreme case of branding (Yuri Arcurs) it is estimated to skew the normal buying patterns by up to 10 – 15 percent. This means that I estimate my income to be 10-15 percent higher on the accounts where I use the Yuri Arcurs name because people recognize this brand.
False rankings are good business for an agency, and there is nothing wrong with doing so. The only thing that you, the photographer, should do about it is try to have awareness of it so you don’t get surprised. Spread your collections out over more agencies so you don’t lose too big.
Half Life (referred to as “Tom Grill’s Half Life “)
Inventor: Tom Grill
The concept of half life is stolen from physics and applied to stock distribution theory. In physics, the half life concept refers to the time it takes for a radioactive compound to reach half of its original radioactive energy. In stock theory, half life refers to the time it will take an image or collection to sell half as much as it did when it was first launched. Because of fashion trends, pictures that are old will look old and they will gradually sell less and less. A picture or collection will never stop selling completely, just like the radio active compound will never completely stop being radioactive. Half life for images in traditional stock is said to be around five years, which is extremely high compared to microstock. In microstock half life is very short. Half life for iStock exclusive photographers is speculated to be less than a year, but the RPI in this first year is very high. Half life for microstock non-exclusive contributors is speculated to be around two years if the photographer has his images online almost everywhere that they host non-exclusive images.
Half life speculations:
Non-exclussive microstock: 2 years.
Istock: 1 year.
Traditional stock: 5 years.
Shutterstock is a very extreme case, with a half life time of about a week. However, the stability of the baseline income on shutterstock after that week is very stable. Half life on shutterstock (as taken from a baseline income without the massive freshness income boost) is very accurately estimated from multiple users with inactive accounts to be quite long: 3 years and 6 months.
MPM, Maintenance production minimum.
Inventor: Yuri Arcurs
This concept refers to the minimum production necessary to eliminate your half life, in other words to “maintain” the same income level as you have now when you hit your half life . My maintenance production minimum is about 220 images per month. If I produce less than this, my income should drop slowly. If you know your half time on the agency or distribution channel (see above) you contribute to, and the number of images in your current collection with that channel you can calculate your MPM like this:
(N/HT)*0,61 = MPM
N: Number of images in current channel/agency
HT: Half Life in months for that channel/agency
MPM: Maintenance Production Minimum in images per month.
Example: For my current collection of images (microstock non-exclussive) my MPM calculation looks like this: (8664/24 months*0.61 = 220) images per month. This means that I estimate my half time to be around 24 months and that to maintain my current income I need to produce at least 220 images per month.
To understand how this formula works it is best to take this calculation from the start. The first MPM calculation I formulated was based on a very negative approach; that when you reach your half life you will need double the amount of images you have now to maintain your income. The formula looked like this:
N/HT = MPM
This is not true however, and I revised this theory to take a few factors into account: Let’s say you were a photographer that just wanted to maintain your MPM and not increase your income any more than that. Using the formula on my portfolio data, I would get (8664/24 months= 361). What this tells me is that if I want to have double the amount of images in my portfolio, I would have to keep a MPM of 361 images per month. But the problem is that if I have twice as many images as I do now, when I hit my half life , I will actually earn more than what I do now because the pictures I have produced up to that point are newer and have a longer half life than my current collection. Are you following? This also needs to be taken into consideration. If we put this into consideration you get the revised MPM:
(N/HT)*0,61 = MPM
By putting in a ratio of 0,61 we get the accurate MPM: The amount of images necessary to maintain the same income without producing too much (as the first calculation would aspire to). The first calculation without the ratio leads to a overproduction of 1.63 (63%) at half life, so the number 0.61 arrives when calculating backward, making sure you hit 100% at halftime and not 163%. This number is accurate fa or half life longer than 6 months, but below 6 months this number should be about 0.69.
You can also use your MPM to figure out what it would take to be earning double or more at halftime. If I want to be at 200% in income at half life i have to produce 440 images per month (MPM*2).
Related reading: Basic Stock Photography Terminology
Hi Yuri,
very interested article, but I must confess that I’m get significant increse in number of views on my web after putting comment on previous article. This is one kind of branding myselft in stock industry. It is long term game but to arrive in “China”, you need to do two things. Take right aim and make first step….hahah
Once again, relly interesting and useful articles on your site. Thank you for sharing informations. When will be first articles in ideo sections…
Regards,
.shock
p.s. sorry for my bad englis… 😉
Slightly off subject there but ok. 🙂 What’s your RPI?
Yuri, this is a great article… I specifically enjoyed the Skewed Ranking section and impressed with your calculation for the MPM. I will be using it fanatically in the next few months, and I’m curios to see the results. Thank you for sharing this information.
Interesting post, using Tom Grill and all. Tom is on record as stating that he tries to budget $100 per shot on file and availalbe for use. Considering what a mess Stock is in these days with ever declining outlets and lower and lower prices, I’m at a loss to see how anyone can afford a $100 per shot expense.
I’m no Tom Grill, or Yuri Arcurs but I’ve been shooting Stock for over 20 years and it’s harder than ever to make a living. It doesn’t matter whether you make a thousand or a million dollars a year, because it’s relative to how much work you have out there (usually). What really matters to me is not my income per month, but what is my average expense and return per shot. In order to keep ahead of low budget shooters at MS sites, i invest far more in productions than I used to – no more “taking” photographs, I “make” them instead so they are unique to me. Getting very hard to justify these kind of expenses, because the return is getting less.
On another note, what happened to your keywording system that you were going to make avaialble for sale? Thanks.
Small remark. I was trying to apply your formula to myself and I figured out that you should make it clear with brackets. Is it (N/HT)*0,61 or N/(HT*0,61). From your example I guess it’s first one. If you apply algebra rules it means that multiplication should take precedence over division.
My RPI… around 7200 images on FL and monthy income between $1000-1500, so let’s say it is $1250. So, my RPI is 7200/1250=5.76
Another variable in this calculation is quality of images, but this is hard to insert in formula .
My first 60% of FL portfolio is maked with amateur 3,5 and 9mp cameras and I’m 95% exclusive on FL.
One more thing to doscuss is “market share”, number of images on agency, number of photographers and number of images in your portfolio.
Very informative, yuri, and coming from you, I’ll just trust the information to be accurate 😉
Now, I’ll apply your figures to my retirement in 20 years or so, and see if I will be able to afford that Porsche or not ;))
Jorgen
Mariusz Jurgielewics. I think you are right. I will add them right away. New version:
(N/HT)*0,61
Great Article, but as I amnew and trying to find the right sites and where I fit in, for me it is not much use at the moment.
I have only been part time and contributing for a year, gone from Micro to Macro had a Alamy sale with just 10 images uploaded, now have 100 images.
What would also be a help would be a formula to give a point of where you should start hitting sales.
But as to your formula, I contribute to Alamy and if we take the last quarter 1,307,666 images were added to the collection, so the collection growth was a about (12m to 13.3m) around 10% a quarter, so should you not maybe factor in another 3.33% a month to allow for this and keep your ratio to collection?
David
Interesting article in the last formula. I’m a BIG hater of RPI as having any value whatsoever but that’s just me. I can see why people like it – it’s simple. It tells you very little by itself though.
Anyhoo – glad to see you writing more here. I hope you keep it up! It’s interesting to see how others think.
~Matt
RPI is a great tool for decision making. It says nothing about other qualities in stock. If you are professionally involved in stock photography, you need tools like RPI and MPM.
RPI would be a lot more useful if you had.a way to keep it comparative without a billion hours of work.
A simple rpi doesn’t tell you much tho. I would rather earn 10K on 10000 images than 5K on 7500 images even though the RPI of the second is higher. If you add 100 or 500 images RPI drops. If you do rpi monthly but tend to upload in the latter halves of months, rpi is also skewed. If you have one really strong or weak site, RPI is ALSO skewed. Maybe there is a place RPI is useful in decision making but keeping your control groups controlled and not random is extremely difficult because of the lack of organizational tools available on most sites.
By the way half life and MPM are fantastic statistical measurements. I will play with those a lot more as we were just talking about this last night in regards to ‘stagnant’ levels so thanks!
Matt,
” I would rather earn 10K on 10000 images than 5K on 7500 images even though the RPI of the second is higher.”
No it isn’t. It’s dollars divided by images, not the other way around. $10K/10K images = 1 rpi. $5000/7500 images = .66 RPI.
Sorry Ben, you’re right on that. I meant the other way – $7500 on 5000 images. I’d still go with $10k on 10k images first. 🙂
Anyhoo – this is all getting afield of the great post. I am excited to test more MPM stats. I know that Bobby Deal recently said that he uploads about 330 a month and his earnings have stagnated. That must be close to his MPM, at least for SS.
Matt. Very interesting comment about Bobby Deal. An MPM of 330 is high and talks for a short half life.
Even though you are critical of the usefulness of concepts like half life and MPM, you are yourself using them right now in your last post. This was my intention with this article. To populate the vocabulary used by microstock photographers. 🙂
Great post Yuri.
I find stats to be very useful in getting a general feeling on things. When I read about your MPM theory I started smiling. I didn’t have a formula for it but I did “feel” for it and found that I need to upload roughly 60-80 images per month to maintain my MPM (even in summer). When I came to this conclusion, I was a very happy man. Less work and more play makes Yanik a happy boy! 🙂
Very interesting post and blog. I’ve been shooting microstock non exclusively for about 3 years for 5 agencies and have a modest portfolio of about 300 images. I calculate my RPI based on the total number of images uploaded across all agencies, not necessarily online. This takes into account the small percentage that are rejected, since I still had to put in the effort to produce, shoot, photoshop, keyword and upload the rejects. I’m averaging an RPI of about $13/year; however, note that I prune my poor sellers on some of the agencies occasionally. The philosophy here is that I’ve noticed that images tend to sell in clumps in time during the day. This tells me the same buyer is likely finding and buying one of my images via keywords, then looks through my portfolio and perhaps buys some others. If so, then it makes sense to maintain a lean tight portfolio of only saleable images. If something has only had a couple downloads in a year or less, I delete it after a year (it takes a year as some images might be seasonal). I would welcome your comments on this approach. My other observation is that my niche images tend to sell consistently with no half life effect. I specialize in Jewish holiday and lifestyle photos and the top images sell as well today as 3 years ago.
Great info here. I can’t believe my MPM is as low as it is…I’m not sure I totally agree with it, but what this tells me is that I might be able to slack off a bit more and still maintain sales.
Thanks Yuri for your great post.
I have waited to the end of the month to post an accurate M/RPI – 2.48 and a Y/RPI – 14.8.
Hope to see more RPI’s here.
Do you see any value in a views per download figure for those sites that tell you the number of views? I’ve found it varies from site to site, as well as image to image, but for me 20 is a typical number of views per download. If it gets too high it seems to say that the image attracts buyers attention, but there is a technical or other problem with it which might need fixing/reshooting to generate sales.
Great article Yuri.
But I coundn’t get how exactly you calculated this:
“The first calculation without the ratio leads to a overproduction of 1.63 (63%) at half life”
What is this assumption based on?
Excellent Article, Yuri. I find you’re formula to be spot on and very useful. I look forward to reading more great articles. Thanks for all the help!
Great article.
Istock is supposed to skew rankings by exclusivity, so maybe there is another category “exclusivity ranking”.
I don’t find a clear pattern on the half life of my images. I think that there are other factors that influence the half life, I suppose that given a certain concept as many competitors produce material for the same image the half life shortens. I also think that with the enormous growth of micro contributors this is going to skew the half life of the files because the freshness of the whole collection in a given agency gets faster and faster, making files older earlier.
again thanks for your post. I am translating it into spanish to give it to some friends that do not speak english.
Hi, I am exclusive on istock for a year now, my RPI in April was 6.67, now is just 2.27. In april I just had 141 images, now I have 409.
I am thinking of leave the exclusivity, I hate to keep uploading and keep earning the same.
Any thoughts?
Yes, it is a really great article.
I would like to take the chance to ask a question that till now I didn’t find a exact answer nor a approximated one. I’m working a businessplan for 2009. I’m having a hard time to find really trustable/representative sources to calculate how long a stock image will live in micro and macrostock in order to predict income in the year to come.
As much as I know, you Yuri, are” The Trustable One”. If not you, who else would be?
You did show really helpful work estimating the halftime of a photo on micro/macro agencies. But I haven´t found until now avarage numbers on the “lifetime of a photo”.
I read the example of Shutterstock with a lifetime of only a week (Wooh!). How long would be a reasonable estimate for the lifetime for other micro and macro agencies (and which one would you talking about)?
What I mean is: How long would you estimate that a photo will sell well until the sales start to decline.
The half-life concept applied to microstock imagery longevity is most interesting. I use a more labor intensive but useful method for tracking recurring sales. I only recommend it for people who enjoy tracking their statistics, and have less than 1000 images.
What I do is a few times per week query my top microstock agencies and write down how many sales I had that current month, cross referenced with the months in which I originally uploaded the files. It becomes a matrix in a spreadsheet, for instance at one agency for images uploaded August 2007:
61 (sales in 9/07) 54 (10/07) 58 (11/07) 42 51 47 46 42 48 and so on…
I can quickly eyeball if my images uploaded in 8/07 are still “alive and well,” or if they are dying fast and need to be replaced. I can even use Excel to draw a best fit line on the data to show the attenuation.
Interestingly enough for people who think Shutterstock only sells new images, my top selling images this month (January 2009) are from my uploads in March 2008.
Yuri, what about Grill’s ‘sell through ratio’? Do you make use of that stat?
btw – thanks for your blog. It’s very generous of you to share this info.
To Yuri: Are you using the same rules for the hits on your blog? I mean N=number of posts in your blog and HL is the time it will take a post to be visited half of the times as much as it did when it was first posted.
Then you can calculate how many posts x month you need to create in order to keep the same volume of hits on your blog site. Isn’t it?
To Mariusz Jurgielewicz: I think that on algebra rules multiplication and division are of equal precedence (belonging to the same level) and in this case the left to right rule apply then (N/HT)*0,61 = N/HT*0,61.
Sell through ratio. A traditional shooter I take it. Good question. I will explain this concept a little for the people that don’t know what this is. (You will know this off cause). Sell through ratio refers to how many images of a particular shoot that will end up selling. This concept was very important in traditional stock and great shooters will have a sell through ration of 50% for example. Today with microstock most people’s sell through ratio is close to 90% simply because of the price being so low. Tom’s sell through rations are extreme, like my own numbers just in traditional stock.
Yuri, I found this article very late, right now ;), but it’s very interesting. Specially (for me) the ranking agencies uses. Than the RPI, at Shutterstock I do have 7500 images, in januar I earned 964 US-dollar, so my RPI is about 0.13 … so bad, wow. But, I am not only at shutterstock, and are making a living of microstock, so, it isn’t SO bad for me. But I have to work on it, thanks for the article!
Hi Yuri,
I am just starting out with the micro’s, so it’s all new to me. Selling an image for small pennies is not an easy concept for me to adapt to. I still do OK with RM at Alamy, but now I reckon I should look at micro’s as another market and intend to shoot for that market in addition.
Anyway eventualy getting to my question, you say you need to submit 220 images a month, is that 220 to each agency you contribute to or that is 20 images to 11 agencies. has this rate stayed the same for you over the years or are you having to do more and more to keep the status quo. The more photographers turn to mico as all else gets squeezed keeping your slice of the pie will be more difficult don’t you think?
Do you also shoot for traditional agencies on a RM basis.
Cheers,
Kevin.
…….. also Yuri, it must of crossed your mind, with yourself branding and high profile that maybe the future could be your own Micro site. I would suggest a micro site combined with a traditional RM section for those clients that want exclusive images.
Kevin.
Hi Yuri- I have 3 questions: First, do you invisibly watermark your images to prove ownership? Secondly, If you do find that images have been illegaly appropriated, how do you go after this problem? And lastly, Which microstock management software does your staff use to upload and track your images? Many thanks- Lisa