You remember microstock — it was the last big fad before the current big fad, HDR, took over.  Making micro amounts of cash by selling your very best photos for pennies is now officially dead, because USA Today featured microstock as a sensational way of generating “six-figure incomes” simply by posting photos of your old grannies on iStockphoto, Shutterstock, or, most recently Flikr.  Such treatment in the nationwide Gannett daily portends what I call the “Rolling Stone” effect.  By the time you read about a band or some aspect of popular culture that’s supposedly “hot” in Rolling Stone, it’s stone cold dead. You can count on other media “discovering” microstock, too, about a  year from now, when it’s a dessicated corpse.  But to be honest, USA Today didn’t kill microstock — Google did.

Here’s the real story.  Actual, real, stock photography, of the sort that you can still find today at Getty Images, was once a way for good photographers to make some significant coin licensing their best photos for advertising, promotional use, or even editorial work for decent fees.  Ad agencies and others who needed the best images would hire photographers for a shoot — they still do — while a few niches down the usage ladder those who couldn’t afford to hire a top-level photographer could find top-level images from stock agencies at affordable prices.  Working photographers made extra money and photo buyers saved some cash without needing to lower their standards.  Everybody was happy.

Microstock sort of killed off the lower end of the traditional stock photography market.  Buyers still go to Getty and the like when they want the very best images and can afford them.  But microstock offered an irresistable bargain — acceptable quality images for much, much lower prices.  Those willing to search through the microstock archives could save money.  Photographers made less per use, but could make it up with volume.

Today, a large share of the photo buying market relies on microstock, and there is less room in traditional stock for anyone who isn’t part of the cream of the pro photographer crop — and prolific to boot.  In effect, microstock has killed off part of the market once dominated by the traditional stock agencies.

Now microstock is on its way out, becoming the Beanie Babies craze of the photography world, as evidenced by USA Today’s misleading article.  For awhile, it may appear that microstock is growing, as frantic amateurs and marginal pros try to jump on the struggling band-wagon.  It’s too late.  I know a couple who are excellent stock photographers, prolific, and with their fingers totally on the pulse of what sells and what does not.  They submit their images to all the leading agencies, and garner hundreds of sales each week.   Yet, their micropayments over the years they have been building their stock photo catalog barely nudge into the five-figure category.

Worse, the boom is over.  USA Today’s coverage will help flood the market, meaning even fewer micro payments for the meganumbers of photographers participating.  And Google images will soon siphon off two-thirds of those who are today paying for microstock pictures — as soon as Google gets its keyword and indexing act together.  Today, finding images on Google is a hit-or-miss proposition,  but once indexing becomes complete (and Google has a voluntary keyword entry program going already), most of those relying on microstock will just go ahead and get their images from Google.

You see, for the types of applications that the vast majority of such images are used for, the “buyers” don’t care whether they obtain the proper rights.  They aren’t putting these images on cereal boxes.  They are going in newsletters, Power Point presentations, reports, local advertising, and other outlets.  Microstock was an efficient, low-cost way of finding acceptable quality images.  Google images will become just as efficient, and free, in the near future.  Your photos are probably already finding their way into publications and web sites, even if you don’t participate in stock.  If you have a Flickr photostream and enter keywords for your images, any large size versions you post are, in effect, in the public domain.

Microstock may not be dead yet, but it’s always been a lot of work for not much money, unless you were one of the prolific few willing to spend many hours shooting and posting great pictures that provided a good return only in volume.  Those microstock millionaires are like the Nutrisystem biggest losers: an exception to the rule.