Sell Stock Photo – A Successful Story

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by ctesti

I’d like to thank GoldenHammer and all the wonderful community on Photos-of-the-Year.com. My picture “Beam of light in Antelope Canyon”, which won the second prize 2 years ago, just got sold to a german magazine. They contacted me after seeing my picture on this website!!! That was such a great surprise, see Make Money! Get Photo Sales at Photos-of-the-Year.com.

I started to work with Stock agencies in January 2006. The year went pretty well and this is a review of 9 stock place where you can sell your work.

The revenue per picture greatly depend on your portfolio content; mine was travel oriented and then I started to focus on stock images such as every day objects isolated on white background.

Also I’d like to emphasize that I believe Microstock and Regular Stock are two different markets with different customers. I would never sell my “better” (or I should say my “rarest”) pictures with micro for just a quarter.

I sell newly taken “microstock oriented” (i.e everyday object on white background) or travel shots that did not meet Alamy technical requirements (due to lower resolution).

If you check my portfolio with Alamy and with any Micro Stock you’ll see what I mean. I obviously prefer to sell a unique picture for a decent amount of money, but I also enjoy getting paid for my “not as rare” pictures.

More than 80% of my revenues came from 4 agencies:

Shutterstock – $5.30/picture/year – 22.7%
iStockPhoto – $5.20/picture/year – 22.3%
StockXpert – $4.95/picture/year – 21.4%
Alamy – $3.70/picture/year – 16%

I made actually a lot more money with Shutterstock alone because I have twice the number of pictures that I have on other sites (in part because they are the only micro accepting Editorial).

The remaining 20% came from another 5 agencies:

Fotolia – $1.43/picture/year – 6.1%
Dreamstime – $1.42/picture/year – 6.1%
123rf – $0.69/picture/year – 3%
BigStockPhoto – $0.40/picture/year – 1.7%
LuckyOliver – $0.18/picture/year – 0.7%

The great thing about the RF model and Microstock is that you can keyword and edit your image once, and then upload it with batch ftp on all servers. Then for most of them you just need to add categories et voila! So submitting the same image to 8 different places does not really take much longer than just one.

In case you’d like to sign up to give it a try I’d appreciate if you’d use one of my referal link: you would still get paid the same but I would get a small commission on each sale… which means more money for us photographers and less for the Microstock companies!

Check my blog on the details review on stock photography agents.
http://ctesti.blogspot.com