Is selling stock images worth the trouble?

Hi everyone!

By now I have quite a few nice underwater pictures lying around on my hard-drives and I was wondering if anyone out there actually manage to earn any money on pages such as shutterstock.com etc? Or is it simply more trouble than its worth?

Any advice would be most appreciated!

Best regards, Morten

Morten:

Hope you are well and the diving is good. I think that you can indeed make some money (beer money maybe) with stock but you need to do the work. If you are willing to write as well I think the income can be a bit larger but there are certainly folks making money from stock.

Bill

Dear Bill,

Thank you, I am doing very well and the diving just seems to be getting better and better the longer we stay here

I will start looking into it, I might as well try to let the images work a little for me now that I have them.

Just to make sure, what do you mean with writing, you are thinking magazine articles/equipment reviews etc?

Hope you are both doing well,

all the best from Bali, Morten

I started pulling all my work from stock around 2 years ago. The value of either individual sales or use by large subscription deals had dropped to single digit dollar levels. At the peak I had four figure volume of work available for licensing through various agents. I was seeing images licensed for worldwide perpetual use by large publishers and I would end up with maybe one or two euros commission.

The other issue is what is known as a sub-licensing agreement whereby the first agent you can sign to ends up selling your work through other stock libraries. This means the 100% sale fee can be split twice or three times before you see your money. I

After pulling all images from stock the issues I have since found is that:-

a) Not all publishers using stock paid for it at time of download, and the agency never chased these up.

b) Even after pulling material from stock some agencies continued to license my work.

c) when contacted, none of those in either a) or b) think they have done anything wrong.

These issues have continued to cause me more problems than the original submission is worth.

As an aside, Getty are now allowing bloggers free use of images. There are rules and its not quite a free-for-all but the monetisation of this use is not as daft as it seems. Getty - who own the rights to the meta data describing your photo - can hang advertising alongside the image. As the entire process is based on meta data and its relevance to the advert, I don't anticipate Getty paying a share to the photographer any time soon...

So in summary, if you want to earn beer money go and work in a bar or stack shelves in the supermarket. By the time you have sorted, ID'd and described and keyworded your work the return on your time - not including the time to actually shoot the stuff - is so low you may just end up wondering why you bothered. After pulling from stock I have missed the 'income' precisely zero. It made no statistical difference to turnover.

And if you choose not to allow your creative efforts to be licensed by a third party for practically nothing then I will salute you.