Originally posted by chillchar:
Thank you for the statistics! Do you mind if I ask, how many active photos do you have on these sites, and how much on average do you make each month? I am new to this whole stock thing, but not new to photography. I have been accepted into Fotalia, Bigstock, and Shutterstock 3 weeks ago. I have not had any photo purchases on Fotalia and Bigstock; but I have had photo purchases on Shutterstock. I have 239 active photos on Shutterstock; and I am waiting to see what happens. So far I have made $7 on Shutterstock; but I am wondering if Shutterstock sales are mostly off of new photos and nothing else; because all of my purchases have been off of recently uploaded pictures (within the day).
Any help you can give would be great!
Thanks. |
The best ones to submit to are shutterstock, 123RF, Fotolia, dreamstime, istock (but they are a huge pain) canstock and deposit (in that order) I wouldn't bother with too many more than that or you are just going to create more work for little return.
For me 123RF and Fotolia started out slow but now that my portfolio is larger around 700 images they are really starting to pick up I am almost up to getting a payout every month at 123rf and fotolia isn't far behind (their min payout is $50). The rest are sort of hit and miss sometimes one will do really well and sometimes another.
But I literally make around 5-6 times as much at shutterstock as I do 123rf so you can see the gap is wide.
As far as only new ones selling at shutterstock that is how it is at first, so you need to upload regularly. After your images have been there awhile(about 6 months) the old ones start selling, weird but it has something to do with their most popular search.
Keep at it, I try to upload around 25 new ones a week to shutterstock. It is a big time commitment at first but once I reach 1000 images I will slow down to 10 or 15 a week and I think I should be able to maintain and slightly grow my earnings each month. |
