Do You Specialize?
A few months ago, I wrote an article about squirrels. In the article also mentioned rabbits. So last week in the evening, very late in the evening, I got a phone call from a photo buyer from Switzerland1, who was looking for at least a hundred photos of rabbits. Rabbits in the wild, rabbits in the home, rabbits as pet, rabbits as pest, rabbits as food…
He spent a couple of days looking for photos of rabbits, without much success, a photo here, a photo there but no collection, no choice. I mentioned “what about iStockPhoto, Fotolia and the other microstocks agencies with millions of photos”. He said that they didn't have anything. That was already his first thought. It's too bad that in the end I wasn't able to help him, the budget was over 10 thousand Swiss Francs or just under 10 thousand US dollars.
But I decided to check it out myself:
- iStockPhoto: 7708 photos dealing with rabbits, mostly drawings or cutesy rabbits on a white background, or a rabbit next to an Easter egg.
- Fotolia: 6, only 6 photos of rabbits.
- Getty Images: 879 photos, cutesy rabbits on a white background or kids dressed up as rabbits…
Everybody decries how the big stock agencies are killing the photo market.
- What do you have to offer?
- What do you specialize in?
- What should you specialize in?
- Search for your favorite topic in iStock, Getty's, Flickr… What do you find?
1 I'm in Canada. I couldn't understand his English. My German is negligible, so we ended having the conversation in French. ↑