Digital Anarchy has long been a fan of Artbeats.com stock footage. We have used their footage for demoing our products many times over our seven years of business. Recently I have also used the website iStockphoto.com. Mainly this is because Artbeats focuses on video footage, which our company used to use a lot of when we had video products. Now we are a Photoshop-centric company and need still images, and lots of ’em, to show what our products can do.

iStockphoto was all the rage a few years ago when the company first started. They advertised ‘one dollar’ stock images, a pricing structure that was way cheaper than legacy stock houses like Corbis.com and Getty.com. You don’t buy their images by the dollar; it’s a pay-for-credit structure, and a credit translates into a little less than a dollar, depending upon how many credits you buy in a batch.

The brand’s cost-cutting — or cost-undercutting, depending upon whose side you look at things from — continues to be a hot topic among artists who try to sell their own work, and folks who are able to get their art into stock sites. I listened to a related debate for two years straight at a Microsoft industry event called the Pro Photo Summit.

The iStock pricing has definitely risen over the years since the service launched. They still have dollar purchases in their Dollar Bin, though these images cost more than a dollar if you want the resolution larger than, well, unusable. But iStock, and Artbeats, are still a good destination for getting photographs that are less expensive than, let’s say, taking the time to shoot them yourself. Time vs money, as always.

Must say that I love the vector illustrations used as branding on the iStockphoto.com site. Wonder if they are for sale…

Enjoy your weekend! -debbie