As many of you know, I spend some time submitting my pictures to various microstock sites. I currently submit to five agencies – Shutterstock, IStockPhoto, Dreamstime, Fotolia, and StockXPert.
Lately I have been extremely busy and have little time to submit pictures. As I slowly started submitting a few, I noticed something very interesting.
What I noticed is that IStockPhoto sales have slowed considerably in recent months. In the past, IStockPhoto vied with Shutterstock as my top site and a few times took the lead. However, that has changed now.
Today, IStockPhoto is fourth for me in terms of sales. Only StockXPert brings less. Another problem is that submissions take a long time on IStockPhoto due to their archaic upload system and their own keyword vocabulary. As a result, it takes me longer to submit to IStockPhoto than to the other sites combined. It is even more annoying that after submitting the photo my shot is rejected for a keyword that is pertinent. For instance I had a picture of Jerusalem rejected for using the keyword “Israel”.
Another interesting thing occurred when I was searching for some photos for a friend a few weeks ago. I was rather stunned that, despite their claim to having an advanced keyword system, I was unable to find the pictures I was looking for. I had much better success on Dreamstime and Shutterstock.
Therefore, I have ceased submitting regularly to IStockPhoto. It simply isn’t worth my time. I will not close my account there though and I will submit pictures that sell well on other sites.
However, the future of IStockPhoto right now does not look bright.
Posted 1 year, 4 months ago at 12:53 pm. 1 comment
I hope this series has been useful for you. In the next two blogs I will go over some examples, but before then I would like to discuss my philosophy on microstock. If you’re read other series on microstock, you’re probably familiar with different methods of tracking you make per picture and how you can strive to take new pictures for stock that sell better. I have deliberately not included that information here, and the truth is I would be at a loss to tell you how much I earn per picture. The simple fact is I take the shots that I enjoy. If I’m able to make money from them, then that is a nice bonus.
I enjoy photography, and I noticed that when I started making an effort to take pictures specifically for stock, I liked it much less. Stock pictures are not very interesting nor are they very artistic. They are meant to sell and to appeal to graphic designers for general purposes. Even if I did take pictures specifically for stock, if I calculated how much time I spent taking and processing the pictures and averages out my income per hour, there are a lot of things I can do that pay better. I must admit that I laugh at people who spend hours editing a photo just so they can make a few dollars from it on the microstock sites.
Therefore, here’s my philosophy and strategy for handling microstock.
In this post I’ll mention a hodgepodge of strategies that I have found useful for microstock photography. Keywords are extremely important. I typically spend more time getting the keywords right than I do post processing the image. Always make sure you get these right – because they’ll strongly affect whether the picture sells.
Often the best selling pictures are those others haven’t thought of. Try to be a bit inventive and try some new things. Some of my best selling images were ones where I thought “let’s try this”.
However, my best selling images by far are those I took on vacation. Sometimes I have even paid for a good portion of the vacation itself. Especially if you go somewhere exotic, always remember to bring your camera with you and think about stock when taking photos. Very often I see a shot that I wouldn’t have thought to take otherwise – but I feel it may be worth a try as stock. Sometimes the sales of the shot shock me. Just remember when shooting outdoors to try to take shots during the late afternoon or early morning. Often this means I have to get up quite early on vacation, but I always find the pictures are worth it – whether or not I sell them as stock.
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.
