Sell your photos at Shutterstock
By Emily Price
Shutterstock is a website designed for amateur photographers to make a little extra spending cash for their photos by allowing them to be used by web designers, graphic artists, magazine editors and other editorial types in their respective publications.
As far as making money off Shutterstock, chances are you’re not going to make a ton of it. You’re paid per download of your photos off the site at a flat rate of $.25 per photo, which let’s face it is going to take a pretty decent amount of time add up to anything substantial.
Potential photo buyers purchase a subscription to the site that allows them to download up to 750 photos over a 30-day span of time. With people who are downloading photos in those quantities, you probably have a decent chance of having some of your photos chosen along the way.
Once you reach $500 in earnings, which is 2,000 downloads, then your commission goes up to $.30 per photo. You can also earn commissions for things like referring other photographers to the site, and referring businesses to the site who will buy photographs. Stock buyer referrals earn you 20% of the buyers’ subscription price, and you earn $.03 for every photo that’s downloaded from a photographer you referred to the site.
Stock photography while once a strictly professionals market is really starting to become pretty accessible for amateur photographers. Getty Images announced last week plans to start taking amateur photos off Flickr and paying them the same rate the professionals get.
I’m not a huge fan of only paying someone a quarter for their work, but at the same time you are getting paid something and being given the opportunity to see your work out there. I imagine the majority of Shutterstock’s clients are websites with small budgets looking to get pictures rather than glossy magazines looking to cut corners.
I know a few photographers who upload extra photos they’ve taken on a shoot to stock photo sites. They’ve already technically gotten paid a reasonable amount for their work, and that way are making a little extra cash of the leftovers.
Have any of you had any success with stock photography?
Related:
August 4th, 2008
I have been submitting to Shutterstock for 18 months. It gives me a regular part time income.
Check out my portfolio at http://submit.shutterstock.com/?ref=79468
August 6th, 2008
May I recommend taking a look at Alamy.com as that is a full paying professional picture agency with a good reputation and an international reach and distribution of high quality stock pictures.
They include pictures from amateur photographers as well - as long as these pictures are saleable and of professional quality.
Alamy is paying a bigger share to the photographers than the conventional 50% of the stock photo industry. (In my view the share of the fee to photographers at Shutterstock is ridiculous low).
I should mention that I am not a partner in Alamy or the like, just one of the many stock photographers there (through a number of years) as can be seen at
http://www.alamy.com/stock-photography-search-results.asp?st=0&lic=6&lic=1&ns=1&qt=soren+breiting&go=1&a=-1
Good luck becoming a stock photographer
Soren Breiting
Editor of StockPhotoNews.com