Lessons I learned while working for a mobile stock photos service
With amazing images shot with an iPhone 7 and Google Pixel, digital camera manufacturers must be pretty worried. As for entrepreneurs, they must see it as the hottest Unicorn opportunity in selling mobile photography.
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MP3 players. Voice Recorders. Point-and-shoot cameras. So many things killed by smartphones, and there are much more to come. Shutterstock CEO Jon Oringer thinks that the new dual-lens camera of iPhone 7 “will change photography forever”, and he seems to have a point. 500px and Adobe release the apps allowing users to edit digital negatives in professional RAW DNG files from their smartphones. Kodak announces the smartphone designed especially for photographers. Even Apple Watch strap now has a built-in camera. Can you notice the trend?
According to the report by Technavio, global still image market will exceed USD 4 billion by 2020. Almost 400M mobile photos are uploaded on Instagram and Facebook daily. If only one percent of those could be used by brands and media, that’s still a whopping four million new photos every day. This means 1.5 billion images a year, which is orders of magnitude more than any stock imagery website can offer. Seems like the best time to launch an Uber for mobile photography, earn tons of money, and live happily ever after. Why is everyone hesitating?
Mobile stock photography isn’t actually a new thing. After the release of the iPhone 5, the number of apps like Fotolia Instant, Foap, Clashot and dozens more started inviting users to make money on their smartphone snaps. However big the hype was, no single player in this market has managed to overcome the sales numbers of the traditional stock photography websites, and the images quality wasn’t the only reason for that.
From 2013 to 2015 I worked on Clashot, the app that allows users to sell smartphone photos via Depositphotos. We had more than 500K active users, 10M images, and have learned a lot about the challenge of monetizing mobile photography. To make this business commercially successful, you need to overcome a range of problems, consider a lot of features and find dozens of new solutions.
Mobile photographers can’t get a stable source of income
It is extremely difficult to keep talented mobile stock photo contributors engaged in short-term, highly competitive, and low-reward tasks. The pace and irregularity make it difficult for them to earn a stable income. Sooner or later, these photographers return to wedding shoots, traditional stock photo websites or whatever they used to do before. This problem can be solved by encouraging the best contributors with a system of payment at a fixed weekly rate. And with a reward system of daily bonuses put in place, it could turn out to be what Uber actually does to encourage drivers when entering new markets. But wait… doesn’t this model remind you of a classic photo agency’s typical work scheme? That’s what it is: the model that has been around for almost 100 years.
Mobile photography is still unable to cover all popular topics
Today, a great divide exists between topics that are covered by mobile photography and those that are not represented by it at all. Our research showed that the most popular themes for mobile photos are travel, food, architecture, transport, nature, and portraits. Hi-tech, sports, medicine, business, science, education, and professions, however, are only a tenth as common as other themes. The problem is that these are the most demanded and best-selling topics, and they are usually shot in studios, where no one takes iPhone seriously.
A problem with quantity and quality
The idea to monetize mobile stock photos suggests that everyone will be able to make money selling their best pics. Every smartphone owner has a few accidental but successful shots in their gallery, just like this one below.
Most mobile photography contributors are amateurs, and they upload fewer than 10 files a week, but all of them put together add hundreds of thousands of images a day. How do you determine the best photos and prospective artists in this crazy stream? How do you stimulate the best contributors to upload more photographs? How do you then organize a system of quick tag attributions for the photos and quality searches among so much content? Many of these issues don’t have the best solution yet, even with the help of AI.
Cultural differences
Classic stock imagery contributors often deliberately leave out any hints as to which country the shots are taken in. Try to recall all those pictures of office life, or shots of gyms and labs. In even the highest-quality photos, you can’t detect where a woman is eating her salad — in Cape Town or Bogota? Where is the loft with these thoughtful businessmen — is it in Copenhagen, Singapore, or Panama? The professionals try to take pictures that are equally attractive to buyers from around the world, in order to sell more pictures of those ambiguous women from gyms and science labs.
Mobile photography can’t compete with such meticulous work. Therefore, pictures taken with a smartphone will always have a narrower market for sales. But what appears to be a shortcoming, in practice, often turns out to be an advantage: work in different regions, brands and businesses often need authentic images. Local models, familiar places, regional conditions and local cuisine — all these features of mobile photography differ favourably from other stock photography.
A crowd of frauds
Instagram and VSCO are full of millions of excellent mobile photos that are easily accessible and are barely protected from copying. At Clashot, we received tens of thousands of stolen images a day, and we tried many, many different technical means to detect and automatically eliminate these “borrowed” photos. Still, I am convinced that contributor passport identification works better than all other methods. We asked contributors to send us a photograph or an ID scan (passport or driver’s license). Next, we checked about 0.5% of questionable accounts. A prominent example is an 18-year-old from South America who uploaded hundreds of images from all over the world. Without his “work,” the number of stolen photos in our collection decreased significantly. In addition, we never hesitated to react quickly to claims from original contributors that their photos were uploaded and stolen by someone else. We immediately took those photos down.
New clichés
Today, stock photography websites are trying their hardest to step away from being known as a dump for pictures of smiling businessmen, call-center operators and other clichés that are eyesores.
Surprise! Mobile photographs will come with a new set of clichés. You understand what I’m talking about if you’ve ever seen an Instagram picture with a hashtag #iphoneonly: overuse of a centered composition and top-view pictures, portraits of people from the back or without their faces, all the familiar filters from VSCO and many more. Solution? Well, you can turn this ‘issue’ into your competitive advantage. These pictures of bearded tattooed men with glasses, travelling yoga instructors and people’s breakfasts scream “millennial,” and they will help your customers sell to millennials.
About the Author:
is PR director at Depositphotos, world’s leading visual content marketplace. Previously he was involved in growth and product strategy at Clashot.
