Thoughts on stock photo sites?

Hello, i'm trying to get into stock photography what are your experiences? Any tips that I should know? What do you guys think about istockphoto? All comments are appreciated.

I am in a similar boat to you, thanks for asking the question. IN particular what sort of image release forms are needed, especially if people are involved and would you provide compensation to clients if you use their images. My contracts always contain a release form from them, but do you often offer a token reward to people?

Cheers

The boat on stock sailed long ago. The profitability of shooting pure stock is almost nil in most cases. I think the photog's cut is now 35% or less on a lot of big sites and the sites are absolutely overwhelmed with the amount of content they have, making it really difficult for your work to stand out.

Just go on iStock or something and search keywords you would be using for your different images and see what is there.

Cheers Thomas. Just thought it may be good residual income, using images I have already, but it may not even be worth the hassle. I may be better off relaxing and having a beer or two.

AFAIK the microstock site I'm selling through (dreamstime.com) has the highest payount percentage - much higher than shutterstock, istock etc. As an exclusive photographer (you need to have at least 50 photos approved) I'm getting 60% back. Other sites would give you 20-40%. Also, dreamstime sells not just via subscription (when you get tiny amount per photo - 0.42$, or even less on other sites), but also via credits, so I get sometimes 10$ per single sale. I've been with them for ~1 year now, and earned ~5$ for each photo I posted there (on average).

pulsar123 wrote in post #15088073
AFAIK the microstock site I'm selling through (dreamstime.com) has the highest payount percentage - much higher than shutterstock, istock etc. As an exclusive photographer (you need to have at least 50 photos approved) I'm getting 60% back. Other sites would give you 20-40%. Also, dreamstime sells not just via subscription (when you get tiny amount per photo - 0.42$, or even less on other sites), but also via credits, so I get sometimes 10$ per single sale. I've been with them for ~1 year now, and earned ~5$ for each photo I posted there (on average).

Thanks for the good info. I'm just curious how many sales? $5 per sale x 20 sales = $100 for the year. Really curious if you are making any volume at it?

stillinamerica wrote in post #15068396
Cheers Thomas. Just thought it may be good residual income, using images I have already, but it may not even be worth the hassle. I may be better off relaxing and having a beer or two.

I know some guys that do that and the hours they put in keywording doesn't make up for the tiny amount of money it nets.

ChunkyDA wrote in post #15088993
Thanks for the good info. I'm just curious how many sales? $5 per sale x 20 sales = $100 for the year. Really curious if you are making any volume at it?

On microstock your cut could be as little as $1 or less but you should make more than 20 sales a year

OP being 16 y/o wonder if he knows the difference between stock and microstock sales and the type of images being sold with each. Stock is a big part of my business and each off-season I spend countless hours getting my archive online, in fact looking at buying an archive of film images to get online and sell as stock - this is not to break even or hope for a few extra bucks, it's to make a living off of combined with my other incomes of course. Microstock is generic and most fail to see anything good from it, stock is something think every photographer should do, images should not stop making money just because they're older. Problem of course with microstock is major over saturation of the market, which is happening in pretty much everything photography related nowadays.

stillinamerica wrote in post #15067720
I am in a similar boat to you, thanks for asking the question. IN particular what sort of image release forms are needed, especially if people are involved and would you provide compensation to clients if you use their images. My contracts always contain a release form from them, but do you often offer a token reward to people?

Weddings and senior portraits not sure that's something people would want you putting on a microstock site, I've seen some threads in the past here and there talking about it just not being a good thing to do. Don't shoot that and never really tried to look into it more than what I've seen posted by others, but makes sense (private hire). The microstocks prefer model releases so they can sell the images to anyone who asks for any usage, but again girl hires you for a senior pic and all of a sudden is on a tampon ad through a microstock agency and you could cause a bit of a problem.

Though do wonder about the more generic type images (flowers, rings, etc. at weddings for example) with nobody in the image. Talking only some images, not much work and images you're taking already...would just search if there's a market for them, has to be a wedding magazine out there somewhere that uses that type stuff.