Do Self-Hosted stock photo sites ever work?

It is the dream of every stock photographer – host your own images on your own site, set the prices you want for the licenses and cut out the ridiculous percentage that agencies take out of the payment. What could possibly go wrong? Unfortunately, quite a lot!

This post is a run through of the history, and the results, of my own efforts in this space. And, of course, my conclusions! I started this venture way, way back in 2013 when the buzz on the Microstock Group was all about a new wordpress based theme and plugin called SymbioStock. With some clever interactions between all the independent personal agencies, the intent was to build a networked stock ecosystem that ranked well in Google searches and promoted other sites if your own didn’t happen to have an image that met the buyer’s needs. The expectations were sky high – control over which images were accepted, control over pricing, and great search rankings to boot.

The image above is an early map of the interactions of the sites, produced by Cascoly.com. As you can see, each site would also be able to see an index of images on the other sites and refer buyers as appropriate. The wordpress theme worked – yes, it had numerous early bugs, but I was able to put together my first online agency and get the images available for license via Paypal. But, the load on the hosting company underpinning the site was high during the critical time that you were uploading and processing the images to provide watermarked preview images and various sizes for licensing which resulted in throttling of the site and poor performance in updating pages in response to searches. Nothing is worse than a poorly performing site with a long wait for the page to load. So the natural next step was to move up the hierarchy of hosting contracts to have a more professional Virtual Private Server system where you basically have the equivalent of a processor and memory dedicated to your needs. That solved the bottleneck, but at a price – $45 a month from what I recall. But did it earn something in sales and licenses – 2013 sales were $144, but it picked up in 2014 to provide $360 in sales, of which I kept the bulk, apart from Paypal fees. But even so – income of $360 and outlays of $540 (12 x $45) was not a great business model. My original site has been replaced by later versions, but a examples of the design are still around.

The developer of the first Symbiostock then seemed to be heading for a nervous breakdown with the pressure of bugs being reported and a growing complaint from some contributors that the networking was biased in favor of his own site and some of this friends. I personally didn’t think that was the case, but it got very nasty and eventually the name and some of the software was sold to another developer and Symbiostock V2 was developed. This new developer was more professional and did accept requests for new features, but was very controlled over what he accepted. As a result, the software, which was solidly rewritten, turned out to be very stable. Still a resource hog during uploading of images and so the developer offered a hosting service for the application as well. This was more reasonably priced that my commercial service – $305 for the year. There was also a reliable conversion service between the old design and the new and so no need to re-upload all the images. Throughout this time (mid 2015 to now), I’ve had around 5500 images online. Just short of 50GB of storage needed for all my images, which was the limit of the package being offered.

The new design came with an optional theme for purchase (about $80 I think), but it was a very professional look. Robin, the developer, also created an alternative way of handling a broader set of images than each contributor might have – he developed a common site, Symzio, that contained all the images that each individual contributor had uploaded. So a search on my site would also pull up images from other contributors via Symzio that may meet those keywords.

The final step in this saga is that Robin stopped offering hosting around November 2018 and I tried Bluehost for a time with a standard hosting package. Once again, issues in the load on the server caused slow page loads and so I finally ended up with a VPS on Inmotion Hosting. This time just over $30 a month for a two year commitment. As I also host this website with my stock photo site, I thought that was worthwhile. However, in early 2020 I started to get a lot of SQL errors (the database) and I paid Robin to have a look, but it appeared to be related to the shopping element of the site, Woo commerce. He got the site stable, but it went downhill from there and I was plagued for 2 weeks with endless site failures that also brought down my other sites including this. So in the end I moved away from Inmotion and their VPS and went to a smaller, cheaper package with BlueHost and scrapped my stock site altogether.

So – a ton of text here. What did I learn?

First, setting up your own site is not that easy, especially if you want to customize descriptions beyond what you have on the main agencies perhaps. The latest Symbiostock is stable and still supported (the team helped me move to SSL status (the https:// security approach), but I haven’t added new images in several years. I still have around 5500.

The ranking on Google Images was actually pretty good when I was uploading images and adding new ones. Some of my images would appear on the first few rows of Google Images, above those same images on a regular stock agency. So my images could be found by people searching on Google.

The pricing I could apply was reasonable – there was more structure in the latest Symbiostock and I think we all agreed at the time to a pricing structure of $0.99 to $35 ranging from a small websized jpeg through to an extended license. I got all of this minus Paypal fees.

Illustrators seemed to do better than photographers with more sales. Perhaps photos are “two a penny” and easy to steal. Illustrations are harder to get in forms where you can modify the drawing and did seem to be more in demand from casual buyers.

I got views, but hardly anyone then decided to buy. I don’t think this was because the site was difficult to use – the checkout process didn’t require creating an account – just off to Paypal to pay the license and the image was downloaded to the buyer. But perhaps the sort of people that buy from an independent site just don’t actually want to pay. They want it free. If they are a company, they use a commercial stock agency. If they are an individual or someone just building a website or a blog, they want to just download the image and use it.

My earnings never improved. Each year’s totals have been:

Apart from 2014 when this was at the peak level for uploads, the earnings have been pitiful. Well below a breakeven for the cost of running the site.

I still get people who find images there and buy them – but they are very few and far between. I just leave it there now because I did the work and someone might find something of interest, but my images are getting out of date and of course none of my more popular later works are included. I could add images regularly, but I would have to increase the size of my VPS contract and I have little confidence that I would earn money that way. So it basically just sits these. There still is a forum up and running for current users if you are interested. It looks like they have come up with a way to run it on Amazon’s cloud environment which seems to be a cheaper option. I haven’t asked there recently if anyone sells anything – that could be interesting and perhaps I will! But my bottom line in this history is that I tried all the recommended things but people are just not willing to pay for images!