Yuri Arcurs – iStock far ahead?

Jacob Yuri Wackerhausen (aka Yuri Arcurs) is the microstock industry’s most downloaded photographer. You literally can’t open a magazine, browse the net or drive anywhere without spotting one of his stock images in use.

Yuri recently also became iStockphoto’s No1 photographer in terms of sales. It’s worth bearing in mind that iStock’s database is skewed in favour of exclusive iStock photographers – not independents like Yuri and the rest of us. In addition, iStock limits the number of photographs their contributors can upload in a given month. Exclusives have always been able to upload more images than independents.

A typical Yuri Arcurs stock image. Conceptualised, lit and photographed to sell en mass. It's a lot harder to produce than it looks!

Even so, Yuri has been able to clean every other exclusive photographer’s pipes with a little over 6 000 images in his gallery with a database known to be skewed in favour of the competition. A bigmouth on iStock with over 9 900 images in a portfolio over a year older than Yuri’s has around 4 400 less downloads.

So, when someone is that good, it’s probably worth reading what he has to say about the industry.

I find this comment below to be particularly interesting:

I think that while the all-traditional industry had a big problem realizing and understanding when they were facing serious competition from microstock, the microstock non-exclusive agencies right now have a very serious lack in understanding the actual competition that they are getting from iStock.

They don’t get how far ahead iStock is actually becoming and this could potentially be a problem over time. The microstock agencies are paralyzed by their own success and they can’t evolve beyond the very simple business model of 2004/5. iStock can, and does so extremely well with multiple price brackets and levels, and with educational events for photographers that teach that “little extra”.

The problem is also that the primary CEO’s of the non-exclusive agencies are amateur photographers at best and often don’t know good design, good pictures from less good ones, and really don’t care too much about the “whine” in the design world.

iStock is way better at this and when we start getting out of our current economic crisis, they are prepared for nurturing the high paying customers. Non-exclusive agencies will be the “leftovers”, but the CEO’s will probably disagree to the grave, not realizing that they have been check-mated for a couple of years and iStock has been earning bulk in those years.