In my opinion there is no way to make the money you expect to make as a pro from *most* stock photo agencies. There are some agencies that do a good job and treat their photographers right and you'll know them because they've been around since before the internet. They also know the value of a good photo and won't peddle bad images.

The current crop of online stock agencies can only serve one purpose and that is to dilute the photography market and make it harder for the pros to continue making the money they deserve. Why pay for a top-shelf shot when you can get bathtub gin for nearly free?

I wonder if a professional photographer could not accomplish better sales of photos by using a personal site. If the personal photography website was built to advertise "stock photos" in a specific area (e.g. country or region specific or maybe topical photos), would they get similar money out of their photos? At the above mentioned rates, they would only have to sell one fifth the photos to make the same money.

Well, I guess the people that browse the stock photo sites may not be searching for "stock photos" out there on the web. So, if the photos are not in the stock photo website's stock, it will never be found, more than likely.

Just thinking aloud.

i have been looking in to making a stock image site for a small while now and i have a few comments to make.

1 i do think they are a very good facility for any company that needs graphics no matter what the medium (we build websites but i am also a photographer)

2 advertising a site with proper "seo" is stupid expensive (we provide "seo" as a service and we spend a lot of time to get great results but when you look at time spent against the money it costs it is cheep).

3 to go up against a site like istock would take some (lots) of very good photos (that are new) from lots of good photographers and have a very big server to store all these images and massive bandwidth and then you would need the time and money to advertise it (seo and contact email lists and link building)

i am still thinking about it and if were to do this i would split the sale 50/50 with the photographer.

the big but here though is it would take about 3 months for google to see the site and something like a year to get on to page one of google for "stock photo"

if enough photographers want me to sort this out i will.

danny

Hi,

I'm a little late with my comment but better late than never :o)

When you can charge $500 for 2 hours work, I wouldn't even think about micros. I would shoot the hell out of my cam. But ...

be honest. How many can charge $500 for 2 hours and be fully booked ? I don't think many can do this.

For those having some spare time, micros are a great way to earn some extra. To make a long story short, you can/should earn around $1/image/month. 1000 images online should yield you around $1000/month.

For those wanting to read the long story, they can visit my website :
http://www.perrush.be/SYF_micro_E_1.html

Greetz
Stefan

I'm not a professional, I'm an amateur who seems to have a talent. I'm in a rural area with a limited physical market, also approaching retirement, and am trying to find a way to turn my hobby into money with minimal effort/start up. Would a stock photo site be a good 'foot in the door' for someone like me?

The $500 for a few hours number is a little misleading. You may only spend a few hours shooting the event, however, there is still a lot of work to be done in the "darkroom" as well as administrative tasks such as coordinating the event with the client and planning the logistics of the shoot. The shoot itself tends to be the easiest part of the process.

I've have a number of photos on Fotolia for a couple of years now, and while I've "sold" 47 files, there are a couple of catches here.

Fotolia won't remit until your balance exceeds $50; mine is currently $47 and change. Second, as mentioned, Fotolia keeps 2/3 of what it charges and I get 1/3. Finally, they are the sole arbiter of what they accept and what they reject.

I have no problem leaving the photos I have up for sale (and maybe submitting a few more along the way) but I'll be reserving my best shots for other venues/audiences -- perhaps including a co-op gallery I'm considering opening with some other artists.

Good luck, all!

I'm by no means a professional, and like the commenter above, from a very rural area with little marketability for my work. I found that Dreamstime
http://www.dreamstime.com/resp166118-free-photos gives a decent return. Once you've uploaded and had your files accepted, the work on that photo ends. You sit back and wait for the downloads. I have one photo that gets downloaded regularly and I get from .30-5.00 for basic downloads and more for extended licenses. I've earned close to $500 over the course of a year, but I've only put limited work into it and I sell the same photos at art festivals, etc. Of course they have a high standard and a lot of my photos get rejected. I also post on The3DStudio where there isn't any approval as of yet, but traffic is much more limited. You do set your own price there.

I actually just realized that Diana above mentioned The3dStudio.com so I won't give you the entire pitch.

In short, you get a 60% royalty rate for every sale you have with us (80% if from a link on your site as part of our affiliate program).

Most pics sell for $4-$12 on our site, but you can set yours higher if you like. No longer do you have to settle for pennies per sale like those other sites. We are set to change the way stock is bought and sold!

While we have been in the "3d stock" business for 13+ years our stock images section is new and just now building it up so it isn't crowded like some of those other sites and we don't go all "photo diva" on you and reject images without a good reason.

We have quite a few big names in the industry signing up now so hope you will give us a shot. Another nice thing about our site is that uploads and product creation are super simple and take just a few seconds per photo you have.

My daughter is working on getting into photography and I would like to set up a website for her. I do a little bit of internet marketing myself and was wondering if she can sell photo's through her own website to start. This is just to get her feet wet.
If so how do you set up to sell the photo's off her sit.
Thanks
Kevin

I am a single mother of 3 in a very small town.I LOVE 2take pictures,of any and everything.I have been told 4 years that I have a photographers eye?&should get into the photography bussiness.With my point&shoot canon,I am often lucky enough to capture a pretty decent picture.Sometime I'm surprised by my images.I would love 2evolve my passion for photography into something more.(Surprise that 2 of my 3 children have seemed to developed a passion for the same.I want 2 show them that anything is possible but don't know where to even begin)Any info would be appreciated. Thanks!!!!

In my opinion there is no way to make the money you expect to make as a pro from *most* stock photo agencies. There are some agencies that do a good job and treat their photographers right and you'll know them because they've been around since before the internet. They also know the value of a good photo and won't peddle bad images.

The current crop of online stock agencies can only serve one purpose and that is to dilute the photography market and make it harder for the pros to continue making the money they deserve. Why pay for a top-shelf shot when you can get bathtub gin for nearly free?

Hi Dave Taylor and Friends,

I agree, SELL YOUR PHOTOS ON YOUR OWN SITE.

1) Purchase a domain, either from domize.com, or goldgoddess.net

2) If you aren't a web designer, have your wordpress.com, blogger.com or flickr.com sites redirect to your domain, or host your site with goldgoddess.net.

3) Have a form made with wufoo.com, that way you don't have to program it your self.

4) Get a pay pal account.

5) Have your wufoo form pay directy to your wufoo account. Provide the link to download the image once the person has paid.

6) Make additional money on the site by selling items from Amazon that are related to what your site is about, in this case photography or graphic design. (There are additional ways to make money with your site.)

Email me at info@goldgoddess.net if you have more questions. My company provides solar powered web hosting. www.goldgoddess.net

Thanks again, and good luck everybody!

April, founder of Gold Goddess

I have a friend who works full time (not as a photographer), he starting posting photos as a hobby on IStockphoto. He makes about $50K a year from IStock and still has his full time job. Of course, he has a lot of photos posted (more than 3,000), but still, it's passive income. He is Dlewis33 on Istock. I'm not a photographer, but I wrote a book about selling online because of his experiences. It's on Amazon. It's not a photography book, it is mainly about selling on IsStockphoto, for those interested.

I was looking into other solutions myself since I was turned off by iStockPhoto taking 80% and not sure I'm sold on the micro angle just yet ...

April had a nice take on it for photographers who want to do it on their own. After researching more, I found a site that kind of does the same angle but they do everything in one so you don't have to do each individual step.

From the research I've done, it's a membership site instead where they give you a working website with a built in shopping cart so when you upload pictures, you tell it to make new pages and it creates all the online galleries for you. It would make you able to accept credit card and paypal too so no need to create an account or get into those details. Then you can set your own pricing on your image and sell gift items too so people can order a photo of whatever on a mug for example. I figure this would open the door to multiple ways of making money with photos instead of only one format which was one of the attractive points.

The site is called Photostockplus. Only thing is that the membership is around $100 / year last I checked. With a lot of negative talk about how much people are selling online, I'm wondering how long it would take to make it back or what else I should think about before dishing out?

Anyone used these guys or know of similar sites?

Stock photography through a site such as istock photography can be way to make useful money. I am a contributor to istockphoto, and I feel there are key advantages to sites like istock for a working photographer compared to a do-it-yourself approach.
(1) Marketing. The established sites like istockphoto already have a huge customer base, a prominent internet presence and significant marketing budgets. If you sign up with istockphoto, they find the customers for you.
Marketing a small personal image library may make sense if you have an extremely specialised collection (a particular town, or niche of natural history), but if you have good quality, general stock images which could appeal to a global audience, I can't see how a small personal website would compete. My own portfolio with istock is quite diverse and many of the shots are potentially global in their appeal. I can't imagine how I would go about successfully marketing my 300+ images, covering around 100 or so themes, effectively enough to compete with the job that istock does in finding me cusomers.
(2) Website management. A large images library needs a good, robust database, excellent search / keywording facilities and reliable billing /payment systems. I'm not an expert, but I wouldn't like to underestimate the time /effort / expense of setting these up. Spending a few hundred dollars would very quickly eat up the anticipated revenues from a small image library.
(3) Other customer benefits - the established sites may offer features like online telephone support, mutli-lingual search capabilities and legal guarantees to buyers, making them more attractive to commercially savvy or overseas buyers. I know I would find it hard to provide the knowledge and/or resource to provide such services.

To follow up on Edward Shaw's comment,yes, many stock photographers DO specialize.
No need to be crowded into a gallery of general pictures. Most photo editors are looking for a specialized photo to add to their book or magazine layout.
Our PhotoDaily takes a different approach. We encourage our subscribers to specialize in something they love photographing e.g. architecture, travel, horses, mountain bikes and become an expert in a single field. Or maybe they already are (in their day job).. They become not only a stock photographer but a consultant. They aim to find contacts through our PhotoSource International service that result in long term value (many publishing house have a $50,000 a month budget for photography). In other words our subscribers are looking for long-term value contacts - not single picture sales. We have been in existence since 1985. We charge $375 a year. Yes, in the pre-Internet days, photobuyers contacted us via fax and phone, and of course, now, the Internet. Many current pros got their training wheels and learned about stock photography by subscribing to the original PhotoDaily We’ve had 7 copycats come along in the last twenty-five years but none are still in existence.

Photobuyers worldwide have trusted PhotoSource International when they need to find a hard-to-locate photo(s). The Internet has been a big boost to this system. For example if you type in sell my photos or buy my photos -- we are on a first page search for sellphotos.com. photosource.com, or photostocknotes.com/psn and have been for two years. It works for photographers too because photobuyers now know they can circumvent the eye-weary online galleries and instead ask Google to show them who has a photo of a particular mountain bike, lake or bistro.