Diversity In Stock Media

In yesterday’s blog post on Pexels.com, Monica talks about The Quest For Diversity In Stock Media. We all know: seeing is believing. And that applies of course also for stock images. In 2017 alone, Pexels saw over 4 Million searches for “love” and “business” and “girl”. What an opportunity to define, what these terms stand for!

Though we continue our quest to widen our photo library and offer more balanced results celebrating various ethnic, cultural, and gender groups, in a perfect world, we’d already have tons of images of gay couples with children, transgendered people at work, and hispanic women programming… but we’re not there yet.

For way too long the stock media industry has been following the same pattern: popular search results were listed on top, followed by the not so popular search results. This is great, if you want to use the same pictures, as everybody else – but following this pattern does also have a built-in self-fulfilling promise: the popular pictures will always be the popular pictures.

In yesterday’s blog post Monika is also listing three steps Pexels took towards a more diverse stock image landscape:

When you search for “women” or “woman” your results will be ones the team and I have personally combed through. That means less seductive ladies …

We’ve partnered with nappy to feature their library of “beautiful, high-res photos of black and brown people.”

We’re launching the Everyday People photo campaign in the month of April …

This is brilliant. We’re not quite there yet – but at least Pexels seems to be on the way. Please feel free to read the full blog post “The Quest For Diversity In Stock Media” over at pexels.com.

New: Symbiostock Maps and Symzio Link Exchange Widget

Symbiostock is basically a WordPress plugin (or I would actually rather call it suite) for photographers that is already packed with a number of useful and very useful feature. The plugin is free – but to use it ‘out of the box’ I would recommend to purchase the theme Symbiostock Express.

In the latest Symbiostock newsletter a few new features were announced – and they look quite promising:

Symbiostock Maps

For those using already Symbiostock Pro theres is now an optional addon available: Symbiostock Maps will read the GPS information from your product pages / photo pages and display them on a handy map:

Symbiostock Maps is an optional, powerful plugin for Symbiostock Pro. It uses the Google Maps API to display your media in a clickable, interactive Google map. Symbiostock Maps is perfect for artists who capture travel locations, architectural marvels and natural wonders, whether it be via photography, video or illustrations.

The demos for this plugin are quite intriguing. I recommend you check out demo1 and demo3. This is probably not something for everybody, but in case you always wanted to showcase your photos, e.g travel photos on a map without much stress and coding, this plugin might be for you.

Find out more about the maps plugin on the product page over at symbiostock.org.

Symzio Link Exchange Widget

The other news is the release of a new widget for those who are already participating in Symzio – “the first completely contributor controlled
stock photo, vector and video licensing agency“. The Symzio Link Exchange Widget will come handy for those photographers that want to connect to others – and be connected to others. Check out the details over here.

New Subscription Extension for Sell Media by Graph Paper Press

Graph Paper Press have just released a new extension for their free WordPress stock photo plugin Sell Media that will enable you to charge customers on a subscription based model: the Subscription Extension. So in case you sell your Stock Photos on your own account / through your own WordPress powered website, this could be an extension worth looking at.

“Think of it like your own private iStockPhotos website where you set all prices and keep 100% of all sales revenue.”

I haven’t tried out the Subscription Extension myself – but the description sounds promising. Basically what the plugin does is that it will enable you to offer a stock photo flat rate to your Sell Media clients – a feature common among most of the big stock photo agencies:

“You can now create and customize yearly and monthly subscription plans that your customers subscribe to for accessing file downloads.  Think of it like your own private iStockPhotos website where you set all prices and keep 100% of all sales revenue.”

Selling stock photos through a subscription or membership plan the margin you earn per photo / per media download may of course be not as large as it is on individual downloads. But a great advantage of the subscription based model is, that it may turn satisfied customers into returning customers. And that again may result in an increased revenue.

The plugin works together with Graph Paper Press’ free plugin Sell Media – but is only available if you have a Professional Plan with Graph Paper Press.

I personally will probably have to stick with solutions based on WooCommerce since I’m really dependent on a solution that would work in compliance with German and EU tax laws. Using Sell Media would probably be the straight forward way, when it comes to selling media. But until there is a solution for the “German Tax Problem” I will probably have to stick with WooCommerce and WooCommerce German Market.

see also:

Stockphotostock finally online!

Welcome to stockphotostock.com!

This is the first post. But most certainly it won’t be the last.

In the upcoming months stockphotostock will transform into a platform, where independend stock photographers (editorial and commercial) can present their stock photos, their portfolios – their work to potential clients.

Read more about what is stockphotostock.com…