Freepik Stock Agency – a deal with the devil?
The rise of Free stock sites has been seen as yet another nail in the coffin of paid stock photography – after all, who will pay for images when there are so many free ones that people can just download and use in almost any way they want? I’ve watched this development with alarm, to some extent, wondering why photographers would give away such good images for free with only the satisfaction that they have a high download count.
But what seems to be happening is that, yes, these agencies have free assets, but they also have sizeable premium collections where their customers can see potentially different or higher quality images available as part of a subscription or on demand. Freepik seems to have been growing recently and so I decided to give it a go. I had made one attempt last year and submitted 20 of my best sellers to their “contributor test” but all of them were rejected! You can imagine how I felt about that! I couldn’t get accepted into a free agency, for goodness sakes!
So many months later, I swallowed my pride and had a second go. I took advice from a friend of mine that what seemed to be required to pass the test were solid well exposed, not over-processed, well composed images. I submitted images from locations around the world, no people shots, no concept shots and this time I was accepted. I think the way to think about it is that they have lots of free images with all sorts of concepts, so that they are looking for much better than the average shot that they think someone will pay for rather than take one of the free ones.
So, with the approval in my pocket, I started to upload. At first, you need to use their web-based upload process, but to be honest, it is pretty good. I simply went back, in time order, submitting everything in my portfolio that was not editorial (not accepted) or which had people needing model releases. I decided on that second approach because it wasn’t obvious to me how to upload a model release and so I saved that for a later date! I saw sales immediately – quite a jump in the first day or so, but then it leveled off and down, then with a few more uploads, the same pattern.
I uploaded a lot in May and you can see the rising and then falling pattern, but I’ve not uploaded any in June and that is showing a sort of steadier pattern perhaps. Currently I have 8925 images published and 1189 rejected. They are rejected for various reasons – editing, similars, composition etc. but I ignore that and just carry on. It looks like I will earn about 5 euros per business day on average I would guess. This is the monthly pattern:
I still have some images to upload – I have gone back to 2012 now and have a few thousand still to find and upload!
So what sells? Here are my top earners:
No surprises there – my cat is high up the list, but also some ones that haven’t sold that well elsewhere. What is also clear is the relatively low earnings from this subscription plan – about 7c per download.
So, am I crazy to upload all my images to this site? Will I cannibalize sales on the other agencies by supplying my famous cat image to this free site? I don’t know, but I don’t think so. I think people have already chosen to go to Freepik and probably look at free images and then they also see my images among them. Are they likely to go to Getty or Alamy or Shutterstock – probably not in my view. Of course I am just contributing to the general demise of the industry, but I am a very small cog in the overall business machine and I think I am in the “milk it for what it is worth” stage of my career. As I have written elsewhere, I am focusing more on print work rather than new stock work.
There is one factor I need to mention though – Freepik is a Spanish company and seems to believe that it needs to withhold 35% of earnings for tax unless you provide a tax residency certificate each year. In the USA, this residency certificate costs $85 for an individual and $165 or so for a business. Now that PayPal is going to report all earnings separately to the IRS, I think I can safely use a personal residency certificate and report the income in my business as normal.
I’ll continue to report progress (and also any ill-effects I see) on this adventure. If you are thinking of giving this a go – here is my referral link for Freepik.
I understand your move, but surprisingly you sell your cat, too? Aren´t you selling it on POD-Sites either? Aren´t you afraid you working against you in case of your wall art images? (Like you did and quit from Canva?
I don’t make much of a distinction between the different places that my images appear. I did cancel my Canstock membership because they had an agreement with a distributor that just did prints and their offerings were directly competing with my own, but I don’t think any of the other agencies have such an obvious print offering. It is possible that someone can download an image from Freepik and print it themselves – it is just too complex to manage the individual files at that level though and so I just take the risk, I guess! And my cat isn’t really something I think someone might print – I haven’t uploaded that to Pictorem, for instance.
Oh, yes, it was Canstock! And yes, I agree with your arguments. Maybe I will give it a try, too.
Same here, was very reluctant at first, especially after failing the first exam. But pretty happy with the way things go.
Yes, I’ve still got to sort out the tax issue though, I will write about that when I do!
I am not sure how you make money. Some images are offered for free there and others not?
All mine are in the premium section and are paid downloads. Other people upload to the free section.
Got it.
I just started uploading to Freepik as well, but I don’t know how an image or an asset is offered in the free or premium section. I haven’t seen that option during the upload process. Do they decide which asset goes into free or premium?
You need to take and pass their entrance exam and then you are able to upload images and choose that they only go into the Premium section. Not sure if you need a different account for that, as I never signed up as a free contributor. I suspect all the ones you have uploaded are free.
Thanks for sharing your experience – perhaps I should offer condolences for reaching the “milk it for what it is worth” stage? 🙂 I’m not quite there yet, but that may change. For the moment, and with a much smaller portfolio than yours, my take is that the risk of undercutting sales at a better paying site like Adobe Stock isn’t worth taking for some 7cent royalties that might require a steady stream of uploads to maintain.
Hi Joann – I accept the condolences! 14 years in this business is a long time and my enthusiasm for new concept stock is at a low ebb. Perhaps it will rebound! There is a lot of unknowns about how people search for stock images and whether these Freepik ones will appear high up the Google Image search for a certain subject – I will check that once they have been online for a while. This is a constant battle to try to protect print sales, and sales from higher priced agencies against the bottom feeders, but also, if people are going for a free one and they see mine at a slightly higher price, they make take the chance. It is going to be an interesting year.
Hello,
Freepik did clearly kill many many creative peoples’ lives literally. Stock contributors can’t act as a mass. They all just let people rob them.
If you enter to the Freepik platform they knowingly boost your sells in first phase to catch you. You think that “if my download count is so high with only 100 items if I upload my 10000 items i will be very very good” no. Thats a lie, a total scam. and YOU CANT DELETE YOUR ITEMS you have to demand it. They give you 0.06 Euro per image sell. This is another side of robbery. There is no any on demand sells too. This means that if you are on demand buyer on the Shuterstock, why you pay more there? you can buy same image from freepik as cheap as possible.
Recently they announced that they change “contributors’ earning calculations” (woow what a science there) I don’t know and I CANT FIND real values about that. I guess they prepared another mistery. I asked many times with my old stats. for example I sold 1000 items with 0.06 income. What will 1000 sells worh after changes? nobody answered (4 days passed)
I don’t know clearly but as far as I can see stock business became a robbery platforms. They became rich by using hundred of thousand creative souls and now they think like this “those poor basterds need us so we can do whatever we like”. that is true.
Freepik was calling creative people to create free stuff with 10$-25$ each piece. They bought you already. They are big now. So, if you a creative person who live with only stock income, you have to act. Design tools are online. Soome tools gives assets too. free platforms are evil they are just traps. so you have to find another safer way and we should pull back our items from those platform.
Interesting, but I think the stock photo business has been heading in that way for some time. Creatives are just cattle fodder for the business and cannot be organized – there are too many and too diverse. So we are at the mercy of the agencies. SS showed the way and others are following, each one a little worse than the next. So it is hard to draw a line in the sand and if you only chose the “caring agencies”, it would be hard to earn much at all. I don’t have an answer. We each choose our paths forward.
They do, no doubt. The whole ‘we need a residency certificate’ thing is a joke.