Microstock

Anyone designing a website, an advertisement, or a presentation often needs images. Photographing them yourself is usually too expensive and too time-consuming. That’s why there are large internet platforms where ready-made photos, graphics, and short videos are available. Microstock is the name for this market when prices are very low: often just a few euros per image or a monthly subscription for many downloads. The prefix “micro” captures exactly this: a single sale brings in little money. Earnings come from sheer volume, because the same image can be sold thousands of times.

Why images suddenly cost mere cents

Before the internet, the image trade worked differently. Agencies sold a single photo to a single customer, and that quickly cost several hundred euros. Today this older model is called macrostock. The price depended on how large and how prominently an image was used. A magazine cover was more expensive than a small illustration inside.

Microstock turned this logic around. The customer pays a fixed, low amount and is allowed to use the image in many contexts. This made images affordable for small companies, blogs, and associations in the first place. At the same time, earnings per image dropped drastically for photographers. Anyone wanting to make money this way today needs a thousand good images rather than ten perfect ones.

This market is important for a second reason as well. Over the years, the platforms have built up huge, neatly labeled image collections. Every photo comes with keywords, categories, and sales figures. Exactly these kinds of labeled collections are extremely valuable for training computer programs that can generate images themselves.

From upload to license

The process is similar across all platforms. A photographer uploads images and tags them with keywords so that search can find them. The platform then checks whether the technical quality is right and whether legal problems might arise. Rejection occurs, for example, if a third-party logo or a person’s face is visible without consent. For recognizable people, a signed consent form, the so-called model release, is required.

When someone buys the image, they do not receive ownership rights, but a license. A license is a permission to use the image within certain limits. The common form is “royalty-free”: pay once, then use as often as you like. However, reselling the image itself usually remains prohibited. The photographer receives a share of the sale price, often between 15 and 40 percent.

A common misconception is that royalty-free means free of charge. That is not true. It only means that no additional fees apply per use. Free images exist separately, for instance under licenses like Creative Commons.

Microstock in the AI headlines

You encounter microstock images every day without noticing. The smiling office team on an insurance company’s website almost certainly comes from such a platform. Well-known providers include Shutterstock, Adobe Stock, iStock, and Depositphotos. News sites also draw on them when no original photo exists for a topic.

The industry has been appearing regularly in business news for several years now, and that’s because of AI. Image generators produce new visuals on demand and pose direct competition to simple stock photos. Some platforms have therefore licensed their image archives to AI companies for payment. Others have been sued because their images are alleged to have been used for training without permission.

This has created an uncomfortable situation for photographers. Their images are helping to build up a technology that may later take away their assignments. Several platforms now pay small compensation amounts to the creators. Whether this will be enough in the long run remains open and is currently being clarified in courts and legislation.