Advanced Stock Photography Terminology- for Photographers

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Stock pictures will normally sell less and less because pictures will gradually start to look outdated.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 So when pictures become naturally outdated they get less clicks, views and downloads and therefore go backwards in the ranking.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