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My Introduction to MicroStock Photography

 

A few months back, around the beginning of the year (2007) I decided to do a little experiment and post some shots up on a couple microstock sites.  I didn’t expect much out of it as my work was mostly fashion and art nudes, not drops of water, mobile phones or business people shaking hands.  Nevertheless my shots started to sell better than I’d expected and so I delved a little deeper into this experiment.

To be fair I really haven’t put in all that much effort into it thus far, perhaps over the course of the year it would have averaged out to around 5-10hrs a week in submitting, keywording and editing (bear in mind this doesn’t include shooting and shoot organisation time).  I’ve really treated stock only as something to do with work I’ve shot anyway just to get a little more income out of it. I’ve never done any specific stock shoots and only once or twice modified planned shoots to include specialist stock work.  I’ve simply shot what I normally shoot and then posted it afterward.

But it is exactly this freedom that I enjoy about stock.  You can shoot whatever you want, and so long as the results have quality it seems they will sell.  In just over 6 months I’ve now raised my stock income to a point where I can mostly give away my fashion/nude work (models really give me the shits sometimes) and should be able to sustain myself travelling around SE Asia (albeit on the cheap).  A feat I’m actually quite delighted with considering the relative neglect I’ve shown my stock portfolios.

Now before we get into specific sites or tips etc I thought I might post up a comparison table I put together of the different sites I submit to:

 

This table is designed to give you an idea of the relative performance of the different micro stock agencies.  The %income columns should be obvious but I’ll add that all percentage figures are rounded off for ease of reading, so they don’t always add up to exactly 100.  The $/month/photo columns provide a great way to see just how much money is made on each site per image per month.  These are my personal figures and of course you may find yours vary greatly from these, either higher or lower, depending on the saleability of your images.  However they may still serve as a guide to comparing the different sites, as each of these sites has had roughly the same shots submitted to them (with some exceptions we’ll deal with in the next part).  The ease of submitting number is merely a number I came up with to give you an idea how simple the process is to submit work to each site - 10 being the quickest/easiest and 1 being the most convoluted.  Lastly is my acceptance ratio, fairly obviously this is a percentage figure of roughly how many of my submissions make it live on each site. 

Now on to part II for a closer look at each site.

Part II —>

Comments

[Gunga Jim Downs]

Thanks for this info.

[joseph tury]

Thanks a lot for the article. I signed up!

[Ben Heys]

Glad you got something out of it Joseph!

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[Samuel]

So I just came across your blog. I've noticed that the last update was in 2007. I'm curious, is this still working for you? If so is it still working well for you or is it kind of gone by the way side?

Thanks for your time,
Samuel