Yay Images – trying a new site out for size

We’ve seen all the issues with Shutterstock over the past day or so, and many people are looking for alternatives. Interestingly, I’ve been with Yay Images (was Yay Micro in the past) for many years and over the years I have actually earned $352 with them. It appears that they are under new ownership and I’ve been noticing a lot of improvements as they moved from the old Yay Micro site to the new Yay Images one. My portfolio had been frozen for years as I must have stopped uploading at one stage, so over the past month I have been adding new images and now I’m about to start uploading video as they move into that phase of their development. They are giving a payout of 50% on sales and right now they also have a referral program that will give me a bit extra if you sign up with this link.

Now will you earn a lot – to be honest I don’t know. My early sales have been pretty small. They have a single image price of $4.99 for a buyer and various subscription plans that work out between $0.5 and $0.83 if you used all your subscriptions. To be honest I don’t know how they calculate what the price of a subscription sale would be when working out the contributor share. I will ask them that question tomorrow as their chat is closed for the day, and will update you.

I have been uploading images to them via Stock Submitter as usual. That app, together with their online version (M+) automatically uploads images to Yay. By that I mean that you mark an image as suitable for Yay, it is uploaded to M+ and then uploaded from that server to Yay as well as the other agencies that I’m uploading to. However, M+ does not automatically submit the images – you need to visit the Yay site and submit them although, to be honest, it is a pretty quick process that is being improved as we speak. I used to go to the old Yay Micro submission site – they have a fancy set of tools for submission now at Yay Images which appear to be even easier to use.

You can also apply to upload videos and show them some examples of your work. You can use the local version of Stock Submitter to do the upload (which allows me to see which ones I have uploaded), but you have to use a CSV file to get the keywords descriptions etc. to the site. You can export that CSV automatically from Stock Submitter and make a few changes to it to be ready for upload via FTP to Yay. I tried that today with one video and it worked very smoothly.

I also had an issue with the FTP, but their online chat person was very helpful and we got it sorted quickly. A nice touch to have a person willing to work with a contributor!

So for now, I’m uploading both images and videos and I’ll report my successes in my normal monthly uploads. So if you are interested (and want to support me a bit), here is my link again. Yay Images Contributor Application!