Adventures with my own stock agency site
As I’ve mentioned before, I set up a Symbiostock based stock photo site about 12 months ago. I’m steadily adding my backlog of images to the site – although I have focused on adding all new ones, and then the older portfolio images as I get time. My approach these days is to put any image that has un-released people or objects on Alamy, Corbis, Zoonar (under the RM license) and on my own site, BackyardStockPhotos. Images that I think are particularly good, or somewhat unusual in subject matter go on those sites as well. Standard stock images are submitted to those sites as RF as well as to all the microstock agencies. It is still too soon to tell if that is a great strategy, but I have enough images spread around various sites to be able to test it!
My own stock site continues to show some signs of life – I’ve tended to price images at around $20 for the maximum size, although sometimes I put that up to $40 for very large panoramas or particularly good shots. Again – hard to tell if that is a good strategy just yet! What I am seeing is a little stability in sales now – better than many of the smaller agencies that have a larger share of my portfolio – I’m at 3000 images now on BackyardStock. So how good is the sales record? The last three months have had sales of $31, $30 and $22, and so far this month I have sold four images for a total of $44. One image sold for $1 (blog size), one small size for $3 and I have sold two at the full size:
$20 for full size panorama Sold for $20 at full size Sold for $3 at small sizeWe have another week to go this month so if there are any buyers reading, now is the time to set a record month!!
One thing that is pretty strange – I have 3000 images for sale, and yet I have sold two copies of that Washington DC monument shot, and three copies of the panoramic landscape in Wales in the past three months. I’ve even sold a similar treatment of that surfboard shot and a different view of the glass of beer by the pool. I wish I knew what I have done to make those two shots either easy to find on Google, or so interesting to buyers. I have posted the sales on Twitter, but that is about all. If anyone can work out how these become more popular than the others, please let me know!
