Dreamstime – doing the right thing!
At a time when we seem to be being driven into the ground by Shutterstock and Getty/iStock are hitting us with 1c downloads of images, we should look towards agencies that are doing this right. I just looked back at my April results for iStock and while the month was good at $460 or so, I had 106 downloads that paid less than 10c. All the way down to one at $0.01. And I had three $0.03 videos!
In contrast to all this, Dreamstime announced that they are increasing commissions for contributors by 10%. So if you got 50% commission before, you now get 55%. This is for exclusive and non-exclusive contributors both. Although the image used to illustrate this article says that a buyer can pay just 20c for an image, I have never earned anything less than 35c for my downloads. I find Dreamstime very easy to work with. I use Stock Submitter (of course) to automatically submit to them and they are one of the agencies supported by Microstock Plus which means that I upload once to their servers and M+ automatically distributes to all the agencies they support. Dreamstime take both commercial and editorial shots and are almost always the first agency to respond with approval to my uploads – usually within an hour or two. And they have been very accepting of my submissions of late – all good news.
I wish I could point to higher earnings, but they are in the middle of the smaller tier of agencies for me. Here is my record of earnings from 2008:
The highest peak in 2015 was $1295 and the earnings in 2019 amounted to $680. So that is pretty reasonable for a no-touch agency. I know that they were very badly hit (probably in 2016) from some decisions that Google made to their search results and in fact there was a lawsuit against Google claiming that the search giant had deliberately done this to favor Shutterstock. A trial was set to begin in May 2020, but I haven’t heard what has happened to that with the virus issues.
They have also published some good stuff on their blog (including some articles from me that scored well in their competitions). Recent ones that might be worth reading include Making Money by Designing Virtual Backgrounds for Videoconferencing; What photographers can do during the pandemic; Creative photos at your home and Photo improvisation during these times. To help others, they have given 5% of their sales income to the Global COVID-19 solidarity fund – pretty good ethical stuff.
So if you don’t already submit to them, then I suggest you do consider that (and maybe use Stock Submitter to make it painless!). I do have an affiliate link if you want to sign up with that, but as I didn’t do this post to drive users to my own link, here is the normal link to join as a contributor. If you are a buyer, then please go along to see what they have (and do use my affiliate link if you do that!)
So in these troubled times, lets remember the agencies that treat us reasonably well!
Good points Steve! I too use Dreamstime and I have found them very easy to work with and responsive!
I agree with all your points. It is just a pity that sales are not higher
I really like dreamtime but sales are few and far in-between. I also do not understand the dynamics there very well. For example, new images do not sell very well there for me. With more people contributing because commissions are higher, I’m afraid I might make even less, but also, it is possible that buyers will shy away from SS because of what they are doing to contributors and migrate to DT? Sales on SS for me have last two days, which is unusual. Anyway, I am not uploading anything there until they change back to the old commission rates at least. Which might mean, never.
The CEO of Dreamstime wrote to me after that blog post and I replied with my worries about low overall sales there. I also asked him about video. I’ll see if he tells me anything I can share more widely. There is always a risk that more contributors means more competition, but I guess that is true everywhere.