A big part of getting sales at microstock agencies is creating images that are in demand.
      




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I stumbled across this interesting website yesterday.  I sometimes forget that not everyone knows about the microstock industry. I thought everyone knew where to buy & sell images, vectors & illustrations at the click of a button!
This blogger mentions that while his portfolio is relatively modest (80-130 images), [...]
         

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/SnapVillage/~3/300080749/
      

Yep, same old tired advice "look at the most popular images to see what subjects sell". 

Which is why the sites are all flooded with redundant content.

"This blogger mentions that while his portfolio is relatively modest (80-130 images), he makes several hundred dollars a year."

Well holy crap, we better listen up, then. Clearly this is an authority speaking, someone who rakes in tens of dollars per month.

What . is going on at SV? Sales are nearly non-existent, and this is what they are spending their time on? We know what sells. They need to start getting on the ball with what it takes to build a site that people want to buy from.

That article qualifies as a big "Duh" for most of us contributors. I'd expect it to be in some grade school publication. The fact that it's on SnapVillage shouldn't be much of a surprise in that the staff is still at that learning level.

I personally think the quality of images within Microstock has risen so high that soon the average novice player will be left so far behind it will make it pointless to submit. Agencies may still allow anyone who can make the technical grade to play but I doubt that that it will be worth their while.

I think you are right Zeus.  I remember how difficult it was for me to get up to speed 1 year ago.  Lots and lots of rejections, and a ton of non-selling images.  The quality has risen significantly in the year I have been active in microstock.  I wouldn't want to be a newbie today, let alone 2 years from now.

I was just looking at the Critique Forum at Shutterstock.  Some of the people trying to get their First 10 images together have absolutely no hope.  The types of images they are submitting will never make it past the reviewers.  They are starting from scratch - no idea of what sells, no idea about lighting, poor composition skills, weak exposures.  But if you look at the databases of a lot of microstock agencies, those types of images were accepted 2 years ago.  There are even sales for some of those poor quality images. 

The quality is rising very fast.  I hope our pricing power continues to rise too.

Wow, Captain Obvious hung up the superhero belt to go work for SnapVillage. Another big part of getting sales at a microstock site is to move out of beta at some point and start attracting buyers.

Ha!  Good one...