Category: Stock Photography
Time to look back at a very unusual year and not just in Stock Photography! It is fascinating to think about all the changes that we have lived through in just one year with some pretty major changes impacting us all in our profession (or hobby) of trying to make money from our photography. Of course the biggest change that impacted newer and smaller contributors significantly was the decision by Shutterstock, with little notice, to completely rework their contributor payout...
A month to end a year that we would all like to forget, I guess! And I will get back to the full year in my annual review of stock activity that I will write in a few days when the final results are in. But lets start with a world first (for me…). For the first time in my 14 years of writing about stock photography (and talking about it at this well reviewed introduction to stock photography video)...
Apart from hide your head under the bed covers as the US election comes to its logical conclusion, that is… So here is my usual summary of themes I have been working on and what I think might be interesting topics for the upcoming weeks and months. It is definitely getting late to upload election related themes, but possibly there might be opportunities for the chaos that will follow election day as the results are counted, different totals are reached,...
A long, long time ago I wrote about the copyright and model release issues that determined whether an image should be editorial or commercial usage but recently I got a message via my contact form from a photographer in the UK with this set of questions: I have plenty of ideas for stock photos to take but one area I am struggling with is copyright/legal aspects. I could not find any posts on your website about this so wondered if...
Once again, a very reasonable month. I know that we are probably in the final stages of this industry in terms of whether a single contributor (as opposed to a group of artists continually uploading new content) can make a reasonable living from stock, but usually the death of an industry takes longer than you think! In this case I think the major impact on earnings is the pressure that is on the stock agencies to get buyers to pay...
I was looking at my recent sales (using Microstockr Pro) and was struck with how often the images that I have created in the past year have shown up in the thumbnails. I usually do this at least once a day as I find that just scanning the sold files gives me a good idea of which themes are selling and also those small size images also give me feedback on whether my images, which might be great on a...
Each quarter I do a slightly deeper analysis of my earnings from selling stock photos and videos online and so the quarter 2 results are in. Overall, the quarter from March to June 2020 was not too bad – ending with $8966 of which $755 came from video sales. Q1 of 2020 was slightly lower at $8458. The historical picture is here: What is interesting about this graph is how the last 3 years have been “reasonably” stable. The end...
This is the follow up article to the one I published earlier this week about the value we put on our art“. Although I talk a lot about “images”, I’m using that as a bit of a shorthand to include videos as well. The key message that I ended with in that article was the following: Your aim should be to maximize the earnings of your portfolio with the minimum effort needed to achieve those earnings Exclusivity – a club...
I was recently pointed to a discussion on the Alamy forum that mentioned a post of mine on whether selling an Alamy image on microstock sites was a good idea. It is actually a very respectful discussion bearing in mind some of the tensions between those that think that the microstock sites have ruined photography and those that think that is just an old fashioned view and it would have happened anyway. But reading the various comments made me think...
The change in contributor earnings announced just 6 days ahead of the operative date of June 1, 2020, has set the world of the contributors alight. Currently there are almost 6000 posts on the forum on this topic alone (and some have been deleted by the administrators), Facebook groups have been formed to organize action and there is a plan to have D-day on June 15th where contributors around the world will deactivate their Shutterstock portfolios. Why all this angst?...
