What Is Microstock & Why Do I Need It?

Written on 22.02.2010 by Maximilian Bartel

Pixmac Stock Photos

Today, I’d like to introduce you to one of the most valuable resources available to designers and publishers alike - Microstock. I’m using it, most other designers use it as well for various purposes and you should probably consider using it too. But what is Microstock after all, why is it that important and how do people benefit from it?

Well, the definition of traditional stock photography is a collection or catalog of images for creative use. This said, traditional stock photography agencies usually have a selected amount of contributors in exclusive relationships. Because of those distribution rights, traditional stock photography is comparably expensive and so depending on the use, an image can cost thousands of dollars sometimes which just doesn’t work for small to medium sized web design projects for obvious reasons.

Now the quite new microstock photography industry fortunately reinvented the way images are licensed and used. Literally anybody can become a contributor no matter if you are a professional, an amateur or even a hobbyist and so licensing images finally became affordable for small businesses, bloggers, web designers or even personal users which is definitely a huge step forward.

So why is it important to spend money on images at all if there’s the Google image search? Well, the answer is short and simple: Because you can get into serious legal trouble if you use copyrighted material just like that not to mention that it’s not okay from an ethical point of view. Aside from that, the quality is often just not sufficient for professional use. Furthermore — but this may be just a personal opinion — I know that many contributors are creative people as well trying to generate some passive income by selling things through Microstock sites and so I don’t mind paying them a small yet fair fee to use their work in some way — trust me, those people really deserve it.

Even if you are not a designer yourself, good photos always improve a designs appearance or maybe even a blog entry by communicating on an entirely different, much more emotional level than plain text does. It’s important to keep things simple, to choose an image a visitor immediately understands and of course to size it properly — but finding the perfectly suitable image isn’t as difficult as you may think, at least not anymore.

Today, you can choose from a vast variety of different Microstock websites and so I guess it depends on personal preferences which one to choose. I already got the chance to evaluate quite a few of them and would like to introduce you to my current choice which is Pixmac, one of the fastest growing Microstock agencies as far as I can tell.

The reason why I enjoy using it a bit more than the others is not the pricing or sheer volume of images available — it’s the usability which helps me finding what I’ve been looking for fast and efficiently. It requires less time and work and so I can pass this advantage to my clients who appreciate less expenses for my research.

Especially the “One Stop Shopping” concept invented and introduced by them is great because now I’m able to purchase the perfect picture instantly without the hassle of an annoying subscription or credit system.

In the end I found a very good quote of Vitezslav Valka, the CEO of Pixmac who said “I am always thrilled to see our customers happy with the user interface. Everybody deserves an easy tool that works!” which pretty much summarizes why I like to use their services for professional creative work.