I’m living from stock photography. It’s about creating useful images for others, uploading these to so called internet-based ‘Agencies’ who make these online, make marketing for these and sell a license for these.
I receive an amount of the selling price, from 15% to 50%, depending on the agency.
Note that I don’t sell the photo. I sell a license (called Royalty-free) through an agency, so the photo can be sold (licensed) many times. It’s a kind of passive income, when I make the photo once and I (can) earn many times from this.
What are stock photos?
You saw a lot in magazines, business newspapers, blogs, etc. But you will rarely see stock photos around social media sites, artistic- or contest-related sites, books, art galleries, etc. Art and amateur photography isn’t stock. Stock is the general, unfinished, product, high-impact, colorful, photoshopped, combined, etc. photo you saw on the product packaging, magazine/book covers, posters, advertising banners and so on.
You can contribute and earn money
Stock photography isn’t a trap or a MLM system. But it’s definitely a DIY/work-at-home job. It’s a kind of business where you may invest some money – depending on what equipment you own currenly – and working hard, learning a lot, receiving a LOT of criticism and earning slowly but constantly increasing money.
Many people has a fear before starting to do stock – can I learn photography, RAW conversion, editing, keywording and uploading??? The answer is: yes, you can… What they don’t know, the most important question is: do I have the perseverance to do achieve these and do these for years?
Referral links
As I said, stock photography isn’t a MLM. However, many of the agencies have a so called “referral” program in which members can have an one-level relation, referrer contributors earning small amounts of money after referred member’s sales. This isn’t affecting at all the referred member sales.
I offer lifetime help (consulting) for every people who subscribes and submits stock photos under me. The small amounts of money add up over years and the time and knowledge spent on these persons pays back. Also I do like teaching and explaining things…
Feel free to contact me before subscribing to the main agencies to learn more about these. But you may click the following links and then immediately subscribe to the contributor areas of these agencies in order to become my affiliate…
ShutterStock – the leading stock photo and video agency, selling mainly via subscription-based model
DreamsTime – a well known agency, selling a high amount of licenses monthly
Fotolia – well known and good selling statistics
BigStockPhoto – subsidiary of ShutterStock, selling only a fraction of ShutterStock’s amount
CanStockPhoto – a mid-tier agency with slow and rare sales but sometimes high revenues
DepositPhotos – (Make sure you subscribe as a contributor) mid-tier agency, a lot of sales but very low image prices, thus low amount of income
123rf, Veer – mid-tier, slow but decent sales
StockFresh – slow sales, however offers 50% revenue. Everybody must upload there, maybe one day the break through…
PantherMedia, Photodune, ScandinavianStockPhoto, MostPhotos, FeaturePics – very slow agencies… Although good acceptance ratios and decent revenues in %, they don’t spend much on marketing so they have little coverage…
Pond5 – mid-tier agency selling stock videos, audio, music and photos
You can visit and read more at the main stock photograper’s forum, microstockgroup.com