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Microstock photography involves uploading photos to various sites where they are for sale, with a portion of the proceeds being returned to you. The micro is because the sales prices are usually low, but hopefully there are enough sales to make a decent return anyway. The pitch is you can make money off of photos just sitting on your hard drive collecting electronic dust. The reality is a little different - it is possible to make some money, but it does take some time and effort to get the photos on your hard drive into saleable form, and taking new ones for sale takes some work too. It is highly educational though, and there is potential for some good money if you either put in a lot of work or get extremely lucky. I suppose some talent and decent equipment wouldn't hurt either. In the long run it seems to be a losing proposition because the number of assets up for sale increases much faster than the number of sales, so return per image (or video or whatever) is constantly falling. That doesn't mean that there are no sales, just that as a contributor you are up against the numbers and at some point hard work won't increase your income and then things will probably fall even with hard work (not that I have been working all that hard...). You can do quite well, but over time it will be frustrating.
I have been participating with microstock photography since mid 2006, although I didn't really do much until the end of that year. Since then I have taken and uploaded a lot of photos, and actually made enough money to pay for a new point and shoot and 3 new dslr cameras plus some lenses and a few other things and then some. My username on a number of sites is "pancaketom". Many of the links below are referral links - that means I get a small amount from the sites if you use the link and sign up, it would not decrease your return at all. Unfortunately some of this page is pretty outdated, I tried to bring things up to date in early 2011 and again in 2017, and 2020, but I am sure I missed some stuff.
Presently (2017) I am still on 13 stock sites, but some have died and I have joined some new ones.
Really only the top few are good sellers.
I have stopped submitting to a number because of various reasons - usually poor sales and poor percentage returned to the contributor per sale.
I will list them in the approximate order of decreasing sales and revenue
Shutterstock (SS) is a mostly subscription site, and generally pays very little per download, but they can add up fast, especially with recently uploaded images (not so much by 2020 anymore). They are my top earning site by a large margin (less of a large margin in 2020). I also have a few video files for sale here.
update June 2020, Shutterstock greedily changed how they pay artists with a combination of a reedemed credit scheme plus resetting to zero Jan 1 plus treating subscription sales as if the buyers use them all - which is not true, especially for the big plans. They did say that the new minimum for subs would be 10 cents (previously it was 25 cents for new artists moving up to 38 cents as you sold more). My average earnings per download dropped from around 63 cents to 36 cents with many .10 to .17 sales (which seemed to be increasing although I didn't wait long enough for that to be statistically valid)). I am very sad to see SS go this way since they were usually my highest earner and hadn't done any major screwing of the contributors until this point (unless you had "guaranteed for life" referral income that they took away). I deactivated my portfolio. Hopefully SS changes their minds, but I doubt it.
the link to my ex portfolio on Shutterstock is :
Pancaketom's portfolio on Shutterstock
The link for photographers is:
Shutterstock for photographers
(these are referral links)
Canva is a little different. They sell images for use on their site to make cards and posters and flyers and so on. This means most sales are for single uses, and there are often multiple sales of the same image for multiple uses. This is good because almost all the sales only bring .35 to the artist. Still they outsell SS in total number of sales sometimes. 2020 update - Canva partnered with Getty and also uses some free content - sales dropped drastically. They also started an all-you-can-eat buffet style subscription plan. Things have come back up a bit from their huge drop, but not back to where they were. Their reviews are slow, pretty random, and have huge amounts of rejections.
Dreamstime (DT) was my first microstock site, and there are many things about it I really like, and a few I don't. As images are sold more, they increase in "levels", and the return increases as well. 2020 update - almost all sales are .35 subscription sales where the level doesn't matter. Very few sales, they have fallen a lot.
My portfolio on Dreamstime.
Pancaketom's portfolio on Dreamstime
If you are interested in checking out Dreamstime as a whole, here is a link....
Dreamstime microstock page
If you feel like joining up, let their cookie stand on your computer, or type in code res181321 when you sign up. That won't cost you at all, and will have some tiny benefit to me. Thanks. 7/13/2012 - It appears that maybe DT takes a cut out of your income if you sign up as a referral, so maybe you shouldn't be my referral, and you definitely shouldn't be someone else's. 7-16-2012 - DT says that if you are a referred photographer you will not be paid less - so do sign up as my referral.
I long resisted joining Fotolia. It seemed like every time I was about to, they moved the goalposts or otherwise screwed contributors. They tried to lure users with taking their sales from another site into account for rankings, but then told me I was already signed up when I tried that. Adobe bought them out and seemed to be making them a little more accountable so I signed up. It took a while to get a decent amount of images uploaded but once I did the sales seemed to be pretty good. Since then they have slacked off a bit, but are above the bottom tier for sure. 2020 update Fotolia is pretty much gone - replaced with Adobe. Sales have been pretty flat for years, perhaps falling a bit. New images do seem to sell here though.
I joined 123 Royalty Free (123RF or just 123) in July of 2008. They require 10 test images so I sent 10 varied images that had been accepted everywhere else and all passed. The uploading is relatively painless, but sales are lower than the top 4 for me. They cut their original 50% to artists and promised doubling of sales - the sales never doubled, but the artists percentage went down. 2020 update - sales dropped again and they made it harder to achieve enough sales to maintain a decent percentage return. I stopped uploading there. Sometimes there are "super" sales with painfully small returns.
To see my 123 RF portfolio, look here:
my photos for sale on 123 RF
I joined Canstockphoto in Feb 2011. Submissions are easy and they accepted a nice pile of my images. I have had a few sub sales so far, but it is too early to tell. Later - sales are pretty slow there, but they keep ticking along. 2020 update - sales are still slow with a few rare decent months. The last batch was almost 100% rejected for frankly bogus reasons. Among others repeating keywords is not allowed so for example "tree" and "christmas tree" in the keywords would result in a rejection for invalid keywords.
See My Portfolio @ CanStockPhoto.com
I joined Bigstock Photo in October 2009 when they were bought out by SS. Uploading was a bit tedious, but nothing like IS. Sales haven't been all that great in the first few months there. When SS decided to pay less for subs sales at BS I stopped uploading there. Sales continue at about the same pace, but it isn't that great. 2020 update - sales are even less.
Here are 2 Bigstockphoto links:
Bigstockphoto link
my images at Bigstock
P5 is primarily a video site but they accept stills too and let you set the price. I have a few videos there which have never sold as well as a lot of stills which sell rarely - usually just a few a month. 2020 update - they are selling images somewhere without really reporting it - but sending the $ via paypal - for a while this was a decent amount but that has dropped off. They have made a lot of changes to the video side of things and I don't think many people are happy about it.
I joined Graphic Leftovers (now just GL) in 2011. They are the most promising of my new sites. I joined some new sites to try to offset the IS loss and to encourage sites with a better %age commission. They often seem to like some of my favorite images, which is nice. Sadly they stopped uploads for a while and never seemed to catch their stride again. My sales graph looks like a raindrop dripping to the left. Many months there are no sales at all. 2020 update - single digit sales in over a year. You can see my portfolio at GL here:
my photos for sale on GL
Featurepics (FP) is different in many ways, you can set your own prices, and they had the highest percentage return. Unfortunately, they don't have very many sales for me. 2010 update- that is old, you can't set prices anymore, and the return is now 50%. They have had more sales in 2010 though, which is nice. The sales continue to trickle in slowly. 2020 update - very slowly - and uploading is no longer as easy.
The link to my images on Featurepics is:
my photos for sale on FeaturePics
Istockphoto (IS) is the original microstock site, and it has the largest traffic as well as some of the worst royalty percentages and the most restrictive rules on uploading etc. It can be very frustrating, but a "superstar" image here can really rake it in. Through 2011 they have continued to treat independant artists rather poorly combined with site bugs and a horrendous attitude I can't really recommend them. Since then they have moved over to Getty and treat artists even worse. I deleted most of my portfolio while you still could. They could have ruled microstock, instead they are mostly loathed now. 2020 update - more and more of the sales are for tiny amouns (often under 1 cent) - perhaps some sort of embedded image. Their reporting is by far the slowest and most opaque.
My portfolio link on Istockphoto is:
no longer available because I don't want to encourage them.
Stockfresh or SF is run by the same people that did SXP, so there is some hope that they can have similar sales. I applied in 2010 but they didn't actually admit me 'til I prodded them in 2011. Unfortunately my sales have been very slim there. They still are few and far between and for only a little. 2020 sales are still rare and for not much. Uploading is a pain.
Photodune or Pd is a little different. They are part of the "envato marketplace" which has been selling web templates and graphics and other stuff for some time. They initially offered 25% so I passed, but when they switched up to 33% I decided to give them a go. Uploading is rather different from most sites, but not too horrendous once you figure it out. I joined in December so it is too early to really evaluate sales. Sales were ok for a while but their acceptance/rejection was very odd and seemed pretty random. Then they cut 90% of their contributors in a really insulting way. I was one of them.
I joined The 3d Studio in the end of Feb 2011. They are just moving into stock photos, but offer a nice 60%, so I thought I'd test the waters. They had a few nice sales and were otherwise slow. Then they decided to stop selling stock photos.
The 3d Studio
I joined Stockxpert (SXP) in the end of 2007, and it didn't live up to its early promise. I keep hoping it will kick into gear for me, although it has slowly increased now that I have many of my images up there. - well, sales began to come along nicely and then Getty bought them out and gutted them and switched a lot of stuff over to Thinkstock - where they would pay less for sub downloads. I declined the insulting offer.
RIP.
I joined Veer (or VR) when they instituted their "dash for cash" and paid for accepted files for a few months. They had a lot of submissions and it took ages for them to catch up with review, but they accepted a nice pile of my images paying me nicely. Since then sales have been sporadic. Then they went belly up... RIP.
link to my portfolio at Veer
There has been some controversy about microstocks devaluing photographer's works, and there is some merit to that argument, although they are also providing an entrance to many people (such as myself) who don't have the time, equipment, connections, or portfolio to get in any other way. In any case, I think digital shook up things more than microstocks did, and the cat is fully out of the bag and my little contribution won't make much difference in any way. There are heaps of people with nice digital cameras and internet connections. It also appears that at least some of the old school professional photographers are starting to sell microstock.
Hopefully the sites know what sells and will accept images accordingly, but ultimately, the buyers are what matters. I haven't noticed any great trends on one site selling one particular type of image more than others.
Shutterstock does seem to favor recent submissions for a week or two. After that sales seem to decrease to some slower steady state. I haven't had a long enough stretch without submitting there to see how low the final steady state might be though, but they held up ok for about a month, but then started dropping a bit in the second month before I started uploading again. Very popular images manage to stay at the top of the searches, and very obscure images don't have to compete with many images, but don't get very many sales. It seems that DT slowly increases sales and returns as images climb up in levels. IS seems to increase over the long run, until they change the best match criteria, then things change drastically (usually for the worse).
As I might have said earlier, the jury is still out if this is worth my effort monetarily. Since I would be spending a lot of time taking and messing with pictures anyway, it wouldn't be fair to use all of the time I have spent with my camera and computer against the income. I think there also might be some sort of critical mass for the number of photos up where your own photos start attracting buyers to your portfolio. In any case, what will really make the difference is how well sales hold up over time. If so, it will be worth it, if not, then it will have been a learning experience. If I can upload the photos I would be taking anyway when I have some free time and a decent connection and make some money off of them, that would be nice. If I end up spending a lot of time taking photos I wouldn't bother with on my own and processing and uploading them only for a small return, then it isn't worth it.
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My impressions of the 6 are:
SS - best earner, most predictable and fastest review times, but it seems like you need to keep uploading to maintain sales unless you have top-notch or very obscure photos. only .25 per download, but by far the most downloads (I averaged double digits per day last month). Starting in May, 2007 photographers with over $500 in income there get .30 per download. I hit this mark in June 2007. They upped the payout again in 2008 to a tiered system, .25, .33, .36, and .38 per download depending on how much you have made there. More recently (2010 and 2011) they sell on demand (OD) images which have become a significant portion of income.
IS - Second best earner for me. Lowest % commission for the photographer (something like 80-20 if you aren't exclusive - lowered again in 2011 to as low as 85-15), most cumbersome, limiting, and annoying upload process, possibly best earner with a bigger portfolio, sales are less likely to drop off without fresh uploads (but if they tweak the search engine, it could really change sales). They seem to be very picky with reviews, often with correct (but nitpicky) rejection reasons. They don't seem to have the same definition of artifacting that I have though. Their search seems to be the weirdest, as their "controlled vocabulary" is rather arbitrary, and doesn't necessarily default correctly. They are coming out with a new subscription model in May 2008. It will be interesting to see how that turns out (only a few rare sales). I stopped uploading here because of their percentage drop among other things. They have had numerous technical, ethical, and PR glitches in the end of 2010 and the start of 2011. The IS meltdown seems to continue through 2011 and I deactivated most of my portfolio.
DT - 3rd best earner of the 5 at this time, Slowest review times, possibly the pickiest, might be picking up some steam though. They seem to have the search that results in the lowest number of completely bogus responses. Subscriptions sales at least move images up to higher levels. As more popular images get to higher levels, the average return per sale goes up.
They dropped percentages in 2010 which set my earnings back a bit.
SXP - RIP - no more, this is just historical now: irregular review timing, often very long waits before a lot get reviewed, but sometimes very fast reviews. Rather poor sales, with frustrating low return subscription sales of the largest sizes. They seemed to start out ok for me, but haven't increased much despite a lot of new images there.
FP - they take pretty much everything, and you could set your own prices (no longer). The search seems rather random in how it sorts images. Slow sales (0 to a few a month). Seemed to pick up a little bit in 2010, but dropped again in 2011.
BSP - linked with SS now. Pretty slow sales.
Veer - Dash for Cash return made them into a good earner for 2010, but the actual sales numbers have been somewhat disappointing. (and now defunct)
It is interesting to watch this business progress. I think the macrostocks in a way brought this on by denying access to most amateur photographers with technical and other hurdles. Then when microstock started, they denigrated it (possibly with good reason, some of the earliest uploads are pretty sad). Now they are trying to get a piece of it (Getty bought IS), Corbis says they will start or buy up a microstock (Snapvillage). I also think that the microstocks are getting a lot pickier and in many cases the quality of the photography is quite similar to much of what is on the macros (but not even close to the cream of the crop). Hopefully the microstocks will continue to increase their prices and payouts for the larger better photos and someone like Flickr won't start giving stuff away for free to cut the bottom out completely. I think the proliferation of decent reasonably cheap digital cameras has done more to change the old school way photographers made money. Microstocks are more of a byproduct of talented amateurs trying to make a buck rather than the cause.
To continue with the experiments, in January 2008 I applied to Alamy, which is a macrostock site that allows internet uploading. You have to upsize the images according to a rather confusing archaic system - upsize based on the size of an 8 bit TIFF file, then save as .jpg. (a much easier way to describe this process is resize to over about 16.8 megapixels). Anyway, I got in, but with only a few images, I haven't gotten any sales yet, and very few "zooms". Check out the links below...
Stock photography by Tom Grundy at Alamy
2011 edit - they have lowered the size requirement and I have uploaded a bunch more there and had one sale (of a web sized image for a small amount). It will take years to hit the payout amount at this rate, but one always hopes for a big sale there. By the end of 2011 I had enough sales for a payout when the sales finally clear - which could take a while. It seems that the uploading in 2011 was worth it though.
2017 edit - they have become my #2 earner with usually a few sales every month, sometimes for triple digit amounts. They have lowered the artist percent to 50% and if they sell through a distributor the artist only gets 30%. It can take months from the sale before you get paid for the use.
2017 mid year review.... 2012 was my best year and things have dropped a bit since then. SS has over 100,000,000 images for sale (they were well under 1,000,000 when I started), so it is amazing that anyone sees my stuff. In general the sites have taken advantage of the numbers and decreased the return that artists get. Usually this is reported as some sort of "exciting news". It is all a bit depressing. But, I get to work on my own schedule and I still make some money, just not as much as I did the previous year. It isn't nearly as motivating despite what the sites say. 2017 end - my totals were actually up in 2017 over 2016 and 2015 levels. This is mostly thanks to Alamy, Canva, and Adobe taking up the drop in SS and then some (and SS is up to some 185,000,000 things for sale).
2019 end of year review.... 2018 was a drop from 2017 and 2019 was another drop of about the same $ amount - so a greater percentage. SS is up to over 300,000,000 things for sale.
As far as sites go in 2018 from best earner to worst earner it was:
Alamy 27.3%
SS 25,2%
Canva 14.6%
Adobe 14.0%
DT 7.4%
P5 4.4%
123RF 2.3%
CSP 1.9%
BSP 1.5%
FP 0.9%
IS 0.4%
SF 0.2%
GL 0
2019 site earnings by order:
SS 29.8%
Alamy 24.8%
Adobe 17.8%
Canva 6.6%
P5 5.7%
DT 5.5%
123RF 3.7%
CSP 2.5%
FP 1.5%
BSP 0.9%
IS 0.3%
SF 0.3%
GL 0.1%
Almost all the sites were down, but the biggest money losers were Alamy and Canva - 2 sites that changed for the worse for the artists. (alamy taking 20% more per sale (about half the drop) and Canva bringing on some additional "partners" and image sources plus lower paying subscription schemes). DT had a huge percentage drop, they just had lousy sales that were mostly subs.
While some of these definitions are simplistic and by no means complete, it gives you a clue.
If you are really bored, my original microstock page is here:
my old microstock page