Royalty-Free
Jan 30th, 2007 by John Setzler
Originally uploaded by John Setzler.
In May 2004, I started playing around with the concept of selling royalty-free stock photography through some of the online sites that do this. After playing around with a lot of different sellers, I settled in with iStockPhoto.com. Since I started, I have uploaded about 90 photographs that seem to have some sort of value in the stock photography market. I haven’t really spent any significant time shooting specifically for stock. I just send things I accumulate that may have some sale value in that market.
Since I started this effort, I have made $1380 with very minimal work. All I have to do is upload the file, assign keywords and categories, and then wait for them to sell. After I have accumulated at least $100 in sales, I can request payment, and the money ends up in my PayPal account within a few days.
I have watched several friends spend significant amounts of time shooting stock photography for sites like this, and a couple of them are now making their living from this income. The amount of money you can make here is directly proportional to how much work you want to put into it.
Over time, my percentage has increased at iStockPhoto, and I’m making more. I currently average anywhere from $40 to $70 per month. Some months are better than others, but the overall average is a nice payout over time.
I think that, in addition to my Signs of the Times project for 2007, I want to add another goal of adding at least 50 more images to my stock library. That works out to about one image per week and should be easy enough to accomplish…
Hey John,
I tried my hand at alamy at about the same time I’m guessing you went online with istock (september ‘05). I only put about the same amount of images up and my return has been $1000 less. I have made enough to get one check (3 sales) that was around $400. And that was last May. Not thing since.
Now, I don’t know what this tells us, exactly. It’s hard to draw any truly meaningful comparison because our images were different (and I’ll concede that your images do look more commercially viable–mine were a lot of flotsam) but it does seem that istock is a quite lucrative option on the whole. Certainly not the “complete ripoff” so many have complained about.
I admit, I was opposed to the “idea” of being paid low rates for images, albiet with a larger number of sales. But my thinking is starting to reverse. It seems that sales have been weak for many of late, macro or micro, and I plan to throw a few at istock to see what happens.
-Michael