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This month was quiet on the submissions side – most of the month was spent with either myself or one of my kids sick. Also the weather at the end of the month reduced the amount of time I was able to shoot. Nevertheless, I still had a record month thanks to some extended sales at the beginning. I exceeded the $350 mark for the first time and I am slowly approaching my goal of $1000 a month.
The following are some details I noticed about each site this month.
I have made it no secret that I currently sell a number of my pictures on several different microstock sites. This has become increasingly more profitable, and I expect some day in the future I may be able to make $1000 a month just from microstock. I am currently not near this number, but my sales have been slowly improving. Still, I have received a number of questions asking what types of images sell best and how I go about taking stock pictures.
When I first started in stock photography, I spent a lot of time taking pictures that I thought would sell well. These were not pictures that I ordinarily would have taken, but were instead taken solely for the purpose of profit. Here’s an example of one of these shots.
This is not a particularly interesting picture, but could be of use to someone who needed a picture of a pile of saffron, which numerous people have needed. This particular shot has sold decently, but certainly is nothing to brag about. What I would find out from doing shots like this though, changed my entire philosophy about stock.
I had thought due to the fact that February is shorter, I would have a more difficult time getting good numbers. This turned out to be far from the truth, as a I had a new best month ever. My previous goal was to make $250 this month, and I wound up with $321, breaking the $300 barrier for the first time. I have decided, however, to not set my goal in March to $350, but instead to set it at repeating $300. The following is how each microstock site did for me.
There has been much debate about sites such as Shutterstock and IStockPhoto and whether they threaten the traditional stock photography business. The issue is of extreme concern to many photographers, who fear that traditional licenses fees of fifty to several thousand dollars per image are threatened by fees as cheap as a few cents. Many of those who make a living from traditional stock photography fear that their livelihoods will be replaced by amateur photographers who don’t know the value of their own photography. Many of those who have debated on this subject have focused on the price difference – people are more likely to buy an image for a dollar than an only slightly better one for five dollars. However, from my experience I don’t believe the issue is that simple.
Last year I started selling pictures on different microstock agencies. When I started, I didn’t really figure that the money would amount to much, but over time it has grown rather significant and now is the primary source of funds for new lenses. For those interested in also selling pictures – or those who belong to different sites, I decided to compare how each site did this month. The following is a chart on how each of the five sites I post to did.
The following are more detailed result from this month and my opinions of the different sites.
IStockPhoto (47.5%) – I had my best month ever at IStockPhoto in January and my pictures are really beginning to take off. Perhaps in the future I may go exclusive with them but right now I would only make about 20% more going exclusive and given the fact that IStockPhoto is still less than 50% of my sales this doesn’t make sense. This was the first month that IStockPhoto was my top producer. Of all the different stock sites this one is probably my favorite as they are the most cordial and consistent with their reviews. It can be difficult to get pictures accepted, but when I look at the rejected pictures based on their reviews the rejections tend to make sense.
Shutterstock (36.1%) – Shutterstock had a decent month for me in January, though it was not a record month. However, this was the first month that Shutterstock did not take first place. They were the first microstock that I started submitting to and I have by far more pictures there than elsewhere. Although my sales are decent there I’m not particularly fond of them. Whenever I’ve had to deal with them directly they have been very rude and they do not seem to care about their photographers. Also, their reviewers are wildly inconsistent. Whenever I submit a large number of pictures I will pray for a decent reviewer. Some reviewers are very accepting while others reject everything – even those that were accepted at much tougher sites like IStockPhoto – with the rejections not making sense.
Fotolia (8.0%) – Fotolia still seems to be recovering from a massive blunder several months ago when they upgraded to a new version of their software. My sales have been slowly picking up there though and at the beginning of the month I wondered whether they would beat Shutterstock. Fotolia has become much tougher with their picture selections – however they have the fastest review turnarounds. Their reviews seem for the most part to be fair. They are now a bit tougher in acceptances than Shutterstock, but not as tough as IStockPhoto.
Dreamstime (7.2%) – Dreamstime is one of the newer sites I have applied to and it was only this month that I submitted most of my photos. This is a nice start and I suspect that Dreamstime will be a stable, though not top, earner. Of all the sites they have some of the most helpful blogs on their main page and they have very interesting photo contests, though I don’t take part because the images tend to sell better on IStockPhoto and Shutterstock (their contests require the images to be exclusive to them).
StockXPert (1.1%) – I am currently quite disappointed in this site, even though I just joined. They seem to be paranoid about taking any shot that has the tiniest potential for copyright – so they reject pretty much any building. A number of other photos that have done fine on other sites and which even IStockPhoto didn’t have a problem with were rejected. Still, I have a large enough number of pictures there that the sales should be higher. I will likely submit some more this month and fix up the image groups to see if I get more downloads. If I don’t, then I’ll probably stop bothering with this site.