Microstockr Pro – I missed it!
I’ve written about Microstockr Pro before, but it is always difficult to justify spending money on applications for microstock. It seems like we are so conditioned to accepting pennies for our images that we absolutely hate spending money (especially recurring money) on services that might make our lives easier! I know someone who earns more from me from stock photography who will not pay for applications like StockSubmitter and Microstockr Pro even though it is clear that she can easily afford it.
I accidentally let my subscription to Microstockr lapse at the end of December and initially thought – “oh, so what! I can see how my earnings are doing from time to time by visiting the main sites – I don’t need to spend my money on this.” So I didn’t renew. The result was pretty amazing – I really missed the program! I would do my emails first thing in the morning and then think to myself, I wonder what sort of images are selling? Are my St Patrick’s Day shots starting to take off? Are people still licensing bitcoin photos now that it has gone off the boil? So I went to the Shutterstock site and struggled as usual with the image thumbnails being on different tabs so it is hard to really understand what is going on. Then off to Adobe to look at sales there, at which point I gave up. It was all too disjointed.
But still I hung on to my plan! By the 5th January, I had had enough. I didn’t know what sort of images were selling and I really missed the ability to look at all the agencies in one place to get a better feel of the way the market was moving. So after 5 days without the program, I gave in and signed up again. Almost immediately, I thought of a new opportunity. I often look at the thumbnails from an image that has sold and think – I could change that to create a new saleable image. One this week was a new series I did on alternative cybercurrency coins – I saw a recent sale of an Ethereum coin:
This is a straightforward photo of an ether coin laying on top of bitcoins. But it seemed pretty clear when I saw it that I could easily remove the icons and make my own versions of other cybercoins in the news and so a new series was born:
This one is a Ripple coin! Already selling on a number of agencies.
So the moral of the story is – don’t handicap your sales by being “penny wise but pound foolish”!
Hi Steve, this is off topic. I am curious to know from your experience whether it is possible to sustain life working full time on stock photography alone or if you have gigs other than in the stock photography realm. I am contemplating taking on photography as a career and I would like to know how much stock photography can contribute to one’s total income.
It depends where you live, I think! The one big selling point for being a stock contributor is that the payments to the photographer are the same regardless of the cost of living in your country. But even so, it takes several years to build up income – just look at my early years in 2008 and 2009 – years when it was generally agreed that getting into stock photography was easier than it is today. So to be a full time photographer you need to have other money earning gigs – weddings, portraits etc in the photography field or almost anything outside that.
Thanks for your reply.
Another question if you don’t mind. I have been selling some videos on Shutterstock, but I would like to try another stock platform for videos. I uploaded one video to Pond5 and Videoblocks just to see if it gains any views or traction, but nothing so far on both sites. Would you recommend uploading more videos on Pond5 at least, or any other site that works well for videos?
I submit to Adobe, Pond5 and Videoblocks (now StoryBlocks). They all get sales from time to time.