WoW! Now that winter is here again, I’ve been thinking a lot about you and this project, I nee to get started! Great new look btw!

Thanks!! I love this new site look and I’m going to have fun this winter. Definitely add us to your feedreader or whatnot and let’s get you started!

The long tail effect works for just about everything – and it isn’t origina, either. It’s just the opposite of limits in calculus.

Interesting adaptation of the long tail. Applied to wedding images and reprint sales, it’s making me consider offering a ‘select’ gallery for the best images and a second tier gallery for those wedding guests that want to dig for the obscure table shot or dance shot that I might otherwise axe. A general question: should ‘we’ charge the same $ for prints of the lesser images, or have a two tiered price structure as well? Premium images and everything else…

The “Long tail” therory sounds convincing and solid, however I think there is a little misunderstanding there: If I have 300 of the best selling images, I still would earn more than having 300 of the images in the “long tail”.

Earning money in the “long tail” means also having more images there which in return means that you need to spend much more time in taking, editing, capturing and uploading these images.

Or haven’t I thought this through at all…?

Hi Matt, I talk about longtail a lot, but this is one the clearest definitions I have seen relating to microstock. I think that after my first year or so I developed a Only-The-Best-Mentality and I find myself editing 100 photos down to 5 or 10. (Hence my limited portfolio growth.) But I do admit that I’ve sent a few shots almost on a whim – brick walls, a boring street lamp with a red ribbon on it in winter – and I have been surprized at how much some of these mediocre shots can earn – even extended license sales.

As important as self-editing is, your post has made me realize that I need to loosen up a bit, gain some mass. This past year I have been so busy running my business that I’ve lost the motivation to add a lot of stock. I guess in hindsight I have been looking at it as a second job that I don’t have time for, when really I don’t need to plan elaborate shoots and as long as the technical quality is there, almost every photo has at buyer.

Lorraine – definitely gain the size & mass you need to carry on with momentum and sheer volume. You can’t be UBER successful with *just* mass – you do need the blockbusters, but the longer the tail, the fewer the blockbusters you need.

EL’s push your images into “hit” category for sure – they are like 80-100 DL worth on Shutterstock at least. I think when we limit ourselves to the numbers we “expect” – that’s when we get in trouble.

Thanks Matt. This is a great reminder that it was long past time for me to go back and upload more of my core images to build up my long tail…

Matt, this is a great series.

I’m definitely a big believer in the long tail philosophy applied to microstock. While demand for any one image may not be massive, the sum of those sales over time is meaningful. This is especially true of something like a digital image where after the initial investment the cost of keeping something in the cloud is virtually nothing.

I don’t remember where I read that, but microstock business model in general is a long tail business when compared to traditional stock (i.e. many small sales vs few big ones).

And now we are talking about our own long tails within a long tail I partially agree with you on this one. Partially because some photographers are much more successful than average microstock contributor. Whether they are more talented, or they are more capable to understand and address market demands – but such people produce high per cent of “best sellers” and their tail isn’t that long.

So for me that means that if my own ratio of best sellers isn’t very high it does make sense to focus on my long tail; but on the other hand it also makes sense to improve myself in order to produce higher per cent of best sellers…

Competition in microstock is tough so focusing only on quantity without increasing number (and particularly the per cent) of best sellers will hardly lead to great success.