A recent Black Star blog post by Jim Pickerell gives advice to photographers who are trying to licence their stock pictures. He’s been involved in the stock photo business for over 40 years.
Pickerell writes that since there’s such an oversupply of stock images, photographers need to get their pictures seen by photo buyers. He then goes on to list some numbers and statistics.
The interesting takeaway from this article is for any business that’s thinking about using stock pictures for its marketing instead of commissioning its own original corporate photography or business photography.
For any given subject matter, Pickerell points out that there can be thousands, tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of available stock images. However his statistics show that most photo buyers don’t go beyond the first 300 pictures. He says “buyers often follow the herd”. He means that stock photo purchasers usually buy the same pictures that other people bought. They buy what’s popular. Some stock agencies even encourage this.
For business marketing, this means that using stock pictures is the absolute worst way to stand out from the crowd. It’s the least effective way for a business to get noticed.
When a company uses a stock picture, the odds are very good that other businesses, including its competition, are already using that exact same photo, (examples: here, here, here and here).
Custom corporate photography and original business photography help a company avoid an identity crisis. Commissioned photography allows that company to create and control its own unique corporate identity.
