Stocksite Analysis: Bigstockphoto 2008

Bigstockphoto is a mid sized microstock agency. Although the site’s look and feel is not as elaborate, unique and cutting edge as the competition’s sites  do (Rather amateurish and standard, actually), the basic foundation and performance seems stable enough to ensure a stable, yet rather low, revenues, with a steady, equally slow paced growth.

For new members, the website isn’t the most easy to navigate through, and the upload system, although updated in 2008, is rather tedious.

From a customers point of view, Bigstockphoto has a nice and extensive search engine with functional pre-defined search queries. This is also extended to the contributors side, allowing the photographer to create an image hierarchy based on personal preference.

Core statistics

• URL: http://www.bigstockphoto.com
• Revenues: Bigstockphoto’s royalties are fair and transparent. A small sale will make the photographer $0,50, Medium $1,00, Large $1,50, and $2,00 for an extra large sale.
• Perks: The elaborate search and sorting feature.
• Downsides: A grace period of 7 days before revenues can be accessed.
• Upload limits: Limited to 150 images per day, also affected by approval ratio.
• Image requirements: Not worth mentioning, but apparent biased rejections occur regularly. Specifically, Bigstockphoto rejects on grounds of “similarities”
• Review times: Usually within 5 to 10 days
• Penalties: None known.
• Forum: Rather quiet, it’s one of those forums people tend to overlook.
• Service level: Fair. You’ll get your questions answered, but it remains to be seen if those answers are useful.
• Portfolio marketing: Bigstockphoto offers portfolio marketing through their search and sorting function.

Tips and tricks:

• Be weary of images looking remotely identical – they will be rejected.
• Deleting any unsubmitted image will equally affect your approval rating as actual rejections do. Be careful when uploading
• The site states rejected images are deleted periodically, but in 18 months, this has never happened. Don’t get your hopes up!

This entry was posted on Friday, December 26th, 2008 at 14:16 and is filed under Reviewing our agents and tagged with agency, Bigstockphoto, Stocksite analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.