Premium – upcoming opportunities

One of the things we should look for in the news are the signs of events or changes in society that will start to generate articles and commentary in the coming weeks and months. As I have mentioned before, some things are just newsworthy because of the event itself – a riot, or a fire – and that sort of event does not generate ongoing demand for what I call illustrative stock photos and videos. Instead, we are looking for things that will be written about multiple times over time and the articles themselves will be looking for some sort of easy to understand header image that will draw the reader into clicking on the article to find out more.

As a result, these type of images need to be clear, to the point and illustrate the topic at a glance. My opioid series continue to be used – often to illustrate an article about some event in that saga (a law suit say), but they are also generic enough to be able to illustrate articles about drug pricing, for instance. The JUUL e-cigarette ones are more specific to the rise of that technology and the use of them by young people and have had their day in the spotlight to some extent, although sales do still arise. I sold two videos on SS yesterday on that topic.

I have also tried to stress the importance of creating images to meet news and commentary in countries other than your own. I think the USA is one of the bigger markets for images and video and so you should always keep that market in mind – the move of the tax day to July 15 (which I talked about a few months back) could have been created simply regardless of which country you live in. The image above earned $30 and one of an envelope with a yellow sticky label sold for $16. Not great sums in themselves, but they only took a few minutes to put together.

My bookcase image has done pretty well so far – around $40. It could be worth going through your older files to see if anything strikes you as suitable for this kind of treatment. The blurring removes the intellectual property issues, of course, so this could be modern books as well as antique ones. A trip to your local library might be called for!

But what are the new upcoming ones that you can create images for wherever you live? Again, some of these have a US focus, but you should create for that market as well as creating local variants. The ones that I keep thinking about that are likely to be bigger sellers in the coming months are:

US Election and voter fraud

This one is already a good seller for me. Almost all of these images could be created regardless of where you live – assuming you can buy those little stickers from somewhere like Amazon or eBay. Try to find ones that are not too specific to one country to maximize your chances of a sale:

This set have earned $120 so far this year and the election is still months away. There is a lot of talk about mail-in voting and so creating more images to quickly illustrate that topic would be worthwhile. As you can see, my two envelope shots are the biggest single sellers.

Evictions and Repossessions

This might be more of a US thing because the extra payments on unemployment run out this month and also the moratoriums on evicting tenants who are behind on their rent also start to expire. As a result, there will be many evictions happening (and probably repossessions of home following a mortgage default. At the moment, there are only 424 images on Shutterstock about eviction notices and I have been creating various mockups to try to get something different.

I’ve started submitting to Shutterstock again – honestly you need to be either in an agency or out. I have chosen to be in because it earns so much every month, and so not submitting new images doesn’t make any sense. However, they are incredibly picky at the moment. Rejections for similar images are through the roof and this one above was rejected for both intellectual property and sensitive information (my scrawled signature I guess). Really annoying as I wrote the text myself and have blurred it in this version. Still, things are what they are!

As usual, I have reused older images (this one of an envelope nailed to a door was for an old Image Brief request) and also composited myself (after the green screen treatment into my home to make other images of the topic)

I have noticed that most of the best sellers on Shutterstock seem to be very simple treatments – a man holding a piece of paper – so don’t forget those (and also add in images of women doing the same thing. I doubt there are many images at all with women in them.

Tax and revenue shortfalls

A bit more tricky, but there are many signs that tax receipts by governments and local councils and cities are falling way behind on tax receipts and so there will be fallout from that and articles written about layoffs and redundancies resulting from the shortfall in revenue. I’m still thinking about how to handle that, to be honest, but bear it in mind.

School reopenings

Another tricky one as many images will be of children getting on buses or in a classroom – the real news type shots. But signs saying – “School reopens on xx date” in a window could be easy to create and earn some downloads. Don’t spend a lot of time or effort on it though!

Recreating older images

I mentioned the list of cliche stock photos in a previous post and I still intend to use that as a prompt for new ideas. My attempts at the call center person have failed miserably so far – rejected at Photocase (which is no surprise), but zero sales elsewhere.

The world obviously isn’t ready for an experienced call center operator! My man with cardboard sign is getting a few sales though. Perhaps there is hope for me yet as a model!

Good luck with your own images. Back with more ideas soon!