online business

orlandosentinel:

SEATTLE -- Kelly Cline's photographs pop up all over the place -- in grocery stores, on Web sites, even splashed on the wall of a supermarket in Serbia.

Cline, who lives in West Seattle, takes pictures of food and sells them online through iStockphoto, a division of Seattle-based Getty Images. Her shots of hand-pressed olive oils, cheeses and California strawberries are available for anyone to purchase, and the response is so strong that Cline said she expects to make about $70,000 this year.

"I've never made this much money before," said Cline, 38.

Cline is part of a wave of change hitting the stock-photography industry. The business used to consist of high-end photographs that were licensed to advertising agencies, book publishers and other companies for hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars apiece. Those photos often ended up in catalogs, brochures or magazine advertisements.

Now, Web sites such as iStockphoto sell images online for between $1 and $15, opening up stock photography to a new audience.

The result: Stock photos are showing up on Web sites and blogs, and small businesses with limited advertising budgets are suddenly interested.

The new business model is often called "microstock photography," and it could be categorized as a form of the so-called user-generated content (think YouTube) sweeping the Web.

With sophisticated digital cameras now less than $1,000, even amateur photographers can break into the business, submitting their pictures to microstock photography Web sites and collecting a small commission for each image sold.

It's not a big industry. Microstock photography contributes less than 10 percent of Getty's sales. The company won't disclose an actual figure, but in 2006 it had $807.3 million in total sales.

There are only four or five serious competitors, and Getty's iStockphoto division is by all accounts the 800-pound gorilla.

But business is growing fast, and some say they expect this to be its breakout year.

"We're just now seeing people look at the model and say, 'Hey, this is really successful,"' said Bruce Livingstone, iStockphoto's founder. "This is the year we're going to see a lot of competition."

Livingstone is widely acknowledged as the father of the microstock-photography industry. He started iStockphoto in Calgary, Alberta, in 2000 by giving his own images away online.

Soon, designers and other photographers joined and began trading images with each other.

Livingstone began charging money in 2001 to cover the costs of hosting the Web site, and iStockphoto has been profitable ever since. Now, it has about 35,000 contributing artists and 1.7 million images available.

IStockphoto sells its images on a credit system, where each credit costs $1.20 (the price drops to 96 cents when you buy in bulk).

It costs one credit to buy a small, low-resolution image that might be best for a blog. The largest images print out to about 11 inches by 16 inches and cost 15 credits.

Once you buy an image you can use it up to 500,000 times. For more than 500,000, additional permission is needed from Getty.

Photographers generally receive between 20 and 40 percent in commission from a sale. For some, that amounts to a couple of hundred dollars a month.”