Making Money from your Photos – An Overview for Beginners

The best, fastest and potentially most profitable way of making money from the photos you have taken over they years is to simply submit them to stock agencies that sell them for use in commercials and campaigns. The easiest of the agencies to enter are the "microstock" agencies. Agencies selling images at low price, but at a high volume. I am currently the world's top selling microstock photographer and yes it is quit profitable, in fact I make more then 1mil USD per year from royalties. The purpose of this post is to give you a two minute, super quick overview of the landscape of microstock and a list of the microstock agencies that are worth submitting to.

Below you will find a graphic overview of my total income from the different agencies over the last three years of my microstock carrier.

The non-exclusive microstock distribution channel (submitting to a lot of agencies, such as I do) still remains the best income provider, despite the higher commission of the exclusivity offers out there.

Finding where to sign up at these agencies can sometimes be a little difficult, so therefor I have provided links to the sign-up pages at each agency at the bottom of this post. If you use the link below you will become affiliated with me and are entitled to personal guidance by me or my staff. We can do this because we get a tiny percentage of your income if you are affiliated with us.

The income speaks for itself but you should always take into consideration the time it takes to organize, upload, attach model releases and assign categories at the different agencies. Some agencies have made it extremely easy to upload and organize your images, including Crestock and 123RF. Other agencies have not thought so hard about this aspect and it can therefor be quite time consuming to get your files submitted for inspection. Files have to be categorized and organized before they are evaluated by the editors where they may or may not get rejected.

If you have just spent hours organizing your files and a lot of them get rejected afterwards it can be quite frustrating. Below I have included the result of a study on average agency online management time consume. (The time it takes to attach model release, categories and so forth once the files are already online).

This survey was done by members of my crew as well as independent testers and was highly significant (p < 0.015).

The most cost-efficient (time spent uploading vs income) agency to upload to is Shutterstock, followed by StockXpert and Fotolia. The least cost-efficient is Snapvillage and Istock. This does not mean that you should not submit to these agencies, but just that you should take this into consideration if you have to do all the uploading yourself. The Yuri Arcurs Distribution Network does keywording as well as uploading for very good stock photographers joining microstock. Read the requirements and find out if this could be you (post almost ready).

Below are the links to the sign-ups at the different agencies. Good Luck in microstock! Istock, Fotolia, Shutterstock, StockXpert, Dreamstime, 123RF, Bigstockphoto, Crestock, Snapvillage.