Best Site for Selling my images ?

jasonsony735 said:
what sites are best for selling your images ?
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What kinds of images?


I sell some work on Alamy and some on the shutterstock/istock/fotolia microstock sites.

Microstock will see you get better returns on average and has a broader market but you have to accept the business model of selling photos for 20p each etc. You need a portfolio of around 10,000 images to make any real money, and that takes a huge amount of time. And like any way of making money you have to run it like a business, submitting photos that are in demand and have a thorough process in place for key-wording and submission. You can outsource these and that makes sense if you are able to take sufficient photos.

However, the boat has really sailed on this. 8 years ago you could have a 500 photos and make $2-3K a year, achievable as a hobbyist. Now you will need way more photos to get way less in return.

Also if your main photography is landscape, nature, wildlife, macro, cityscape, seascape, architecture then the market is over saturated and you will get hardly any returns per an image, and even getting photos accepted is challenging because the stock agencies don't want any more.

For portraits, art and building interiors you will need to sort out model releases.

Lastly, some poeple think the quality of microstock is worse than traditional stock like Getty and therefore the submission requirements are easy - they aren't. It is much harder to get accepted at places like shutterstock than the big companies, and the selection doesn't stop there. Getting a high acceptance rate at a microstock site is extremely hard, and your acceptance rate is used as an ordering criteria when listing photos to sell so if you don't get your rate up you wont make many sales. With the bigger agencies they tend not to check most submissions, and only reject technical issues which you should never make, in contrast the micro sites will reject a fantastic photo just because they believe there are too many similar photos on their database, or the photo doesn't have enough market (which is a conundrum because you want a niche market to differentiate but if you are niche then you might not get acceptance).




If you want to actually make money form photography then just advertise yourself as a wedding photographer and be done with it:D
 
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