Micro Stock sites – Buying and selling Photos / Images
Stock Photographs and Images used to cost a lot of money. If you wanted to buy the rights to use an image for commercial means then you had to pay out. As a graphic designer it would mean charging your client a lot of money to cover the cost. As a Photographer it meant your images would have to be of the highest quality to qualify. Companies would invest a lot of money in building up an image library.
Times have changed a lot and a new image stock site type arrived on the scene. These are known as Micro Stock sites. No longer would an image cost you hundreds of pounds or dollars to purchase. It would now cost you just a few pounds depending on the image size and license type you required. Their images are supplied from both professionals and amatures alike giving the customer a huge selection of images to choose from.
How did this affect the industry? Was it a good or a bad move?
Personally I think it was an excellent move. You will probably find old school photographers disagreeing with me and say something on the lines of how its ruining the industry but I feel these people are thinking of no one but them selves. Sure it makes it so anyone can pick up their camera and have a go at it but you still have to be good to get anywhere. The old expensive stock sites still exist as well. How? Well the very high end stock images are still incredibly expensive. The images that the pro’s may consider not up to scratch can now be sold on Micro Stock sites rather than sit on a hard drive not doing anything.
In the end everybody wins from these sites. Pro’s can now sell images that would normally be considered not at a high enough standard. Buyers, such as graphic designers, can now give their clients a much cheaper alternative (and in most cases I have found clients to be perfectly happy with the standard of Micro Stock imagery). Digital artists can afford to buy images to work with (especially the hobbyist). Most importantly, in my eyes, it gives the amature photographer a place to try and make a little bit of extra cash and get some exposure. The world of photography is hard enough to be successful in. Every little bit of help is needed. With sites such as these anyone can submit their photos and see how they will sell. If they sell well its a great place to work out what to put into your portfolio. It gives you an idea of what people want to buy and it helps you improve your style buy making you think about what images to take that will sell the most.
What Micro Stock sites are out there?
More and more of these sites are popping into existence and giving people more options of where to buy and sell their photos and images. 3 examples are iStockPhoto, BigStockPhoto and Shutterstock.
Signing up with iStock is totally free. They run there service on a pay as you go method as standard. This means you buy credits with them and use these credits to buy images. Photographs and Images can be downloaded at various sizes so can cost anywhere from 1 credit up to 28. This is amazingly cheap compared to the old days. If you want to sell Photos using iStock then you will make 20% on each sale. So if an image is purchased for £5 you would make £1. If you agree to be exclusive with them then they will pay you more.
A site that works very similar to iStock is Big Stock Photo. It is basically the same system and you can pay as you go with credits to buy images or sell your images through them. Sign up with them here
Another Popular Micro stock site that works slightly different is Shutterstock. Rather than a pay as you go system you pay for a monthly membership and get a certain amount of photos / images a month you can download. If you download a lot of photos / images then this could be a better site to use as it works out incredibly cheap. If your a photographer looking to sell your photographs they will pay you for each image of yours downloaded. Get a lot of popular photos / images on there and you can make a nice tidy sum of money. There are a lot people out there who have made several thousand a year doing this. There are also people who have a career selling to micro stock sites but you have to be pretty good to do this and work really hard at it.
If you want to sell photos using Shutterstock then sign up totally for free here.
If you want to buy photos from Shutterstock then you will want to sign up here.
There are many other Micro Stock sites out there such as these. The way to really make money selling your photos is to submit them to as many Micro Stock sites as possible. Unless you become exclusive to one of these sites then you can sell the same images to each site. This gives you a wider audience and makes it more likely you will make more money.
Why not try all the suggestions given in the right hand sidebar of this website. Sign up to them using those links and start trying to earn your self some money.
You may find some sites don’t accept you straight away but they tend to give you a reason why. Also if you don’t get excepted most sites will allow you to try again after a set number of days. If you don’t get accepted straight away, don’t get disheartened, just try again.
Tags: buying images, buying photos, iStock, micro stock, photography, selling images, selling photos, Shutterstock, stock images, stock photos, thoughts
I happy reading your post. Thank you for share great information.