Sell your photos online

Posted on 14 Jul 2008 at 14:12

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Publishers and designers are crying out for photos to illustrate their wares. With a digital camera and some advice from Adam Banks, you could sell your snaps online.

Creativity isn't limited to professionals, but however much you enjoy a hobby such as photography, making money from it is another matter.

Stock photo libraries are collections of pictures that designers and publishers can buy rather than having to send a photographer to shoot original images. Now there's a new kind of stock library, known as microstock, that lets anyone who produces photos, illustrations, video or audio sell their work to people who can use it.

The 'micro' in microstock refers to 'micropayment', the idea of e-commerce enabling users to make large numbers of low-value purchases easily. Low prices have made microstock popular, but it means you don't get much money from each sale - a few pounds at best, a few pence at worst. The trick is to sell a lot of pictures, and sell each picture many times. iStock's most successful contributor to date is Lise Gagne from Quebec. At the time of writing, she's sold 707,892 downloads. That's worth more than a million pounds.

The most popular single file on iStock isn't one of Lise's, but a photo of a girl blowing a dandelion clock, by Eva Serrabassa. She's sold this picture more than 11,000 times - and since pressing the Upload button two years ago, all she had to do was watch the money roll in.

In this article we'll look at how microstock works and what kind of content is likely to sell. We'll concentrate on photos and illustrations, by far the biggest market, but there's a growing market for video and audio clips, too.

Microstock sites

Buying and selling microstock is incredibly simple - it's even easier than using eBay. To become a 'contributor' and sell your own work, you first submit a few sample images (or video or audio files) for checking. Once those are accepted, you can start uploading.

The best-known microstock site is iStockphoto (www.istockphoto.com). Founded in 2000, it's based in Canada but used worldwide and has more than three million files. iStock is now owned by the media giant Getty Images, but it still feels like a close-knit community. One of iStock's younger rivals is Fotolia (en.fotolia.com), which started in New York in 2005 and already has more than 3.7 million files. Its founders have tried to create a pricing model that's more lucrative for sellers. We'll see how that stacks up in a moment.

At the other end of the price scale, Shutterstock (www.shutterstock.com) works on a subscription basis. Instead of paying per image, buyers sign up for a monthly fee that covers up to 750 downloads. There's less money to be made by sellers, but the subscription model has been so successful that other services have adopted it as an option, including iStock.

Stockxpert (www.stockxpert.com) is a paid-for spin-off from the free photo site Stock.XCHNG (www.sxc.hu), while moodboard.com is a new microstock service from the founder of stock company Digital Vision. Other microstock sites include SnapVillage (www.snapvillage.com), BigStockPhoto (www.bigstockphoto.com) and 123RF (www.123rf.com). Visiting all of them will a valuable experience to would-be sellers.