MicrostockGroup

Background info
I discovered microstock when I was browsing the internet looking for ways to make money online. Nothing seemed like it would work.  Finally I decided to be more specific and look for ways to make money with something I enjoyed doing anyways (photography).  After a quick search, I came across this website http://www.photosecrets.com/sell.microstock.html and uploaded about 10 snapshots (pictures not geared toward microstock) to places like 123rf, bigstockphoto and dreamstime. 

I kept checking periodically and after about a month, I seen a sale.  I thought to myself, "Hey, maybe this isn't a scam."  I uploaded a few more and seen more sales.  It was soon realized that perhaps if I upload even more I can make a substantial amount of money.  Well the rest is history, even though I might not be a top player, I can happily say that Microstock easily pays for my fun hobby.

*Interesting Fact*
It took me 4 tries to get accepted @ Shutterstock
1 try @ Istock
5 tries @ Stockxpert

Like DF, I was searching for stock photos websites.  I saw microstock sites too, but they weren't what I was looking for.  That's when I started in Shutterpoint, and I met another Brazilian there who insisted I should try microstock.  I decided to try it (IS was first) with a different set of images (food, macro shots of ordinary subjects, isolations).  Despite this colleague's insistence, I never joined SS because I considered subs outrageous.  Good times when the big sites hadn't yet surrendered to it!

Someone from a fotocommunity told about selling pictures trough some stocksites ....that was last year
So I was a little bit curious. I'm glad I got accepted very quick at the big 6 and later to several others to...

I like this. Confessions of a Microstock Contributor.

I started as a buyer. As a graphic designer I stumbled upon Istock in 2006 when faced with another battle to find an affordable stock image for a client. In those days we were buying complete CDs from digitalvision costing around $600-700 (USD) for 80-100 images. These were fantastic but limited to 1 subject.

Istock was great because we could find individual images to fill all the holes in jobs that would otherwise have had nothing or someone would have had to draw something or create a graphic.

I then wondered if i could sell some stuff as well and started uploading images that I'd shot for older client jobs and i quite enjoyed it. The process encouraged me to improve my photographic skills.

Don't make enough money out of it to take it to a higher level (ie produce more) so i trickle some images in when i'm quiet with client work.

Cheers
Gary

I'm so old and feeble minded that I can't recall where I first heard about it... but I do remember the DPreview bashing and also an article in Popular Photography magazine.

I tried uploading film scans at first to iStock and was throughly bashed for 'noise' (film grain).
So instead of sending them super high resolution film scans, I sent some junk I had taken with a 5 megapixel Sony digicam and got accepted!

I concluded that the punk, er ahem...young people doing the inspections had never in their lives shot a piece of film or ever looped a chrome.
Oh well. I got in and that's all that counts. 

Some one at the forums at fotofanatic.com (contest site) "confessed" he was selling at Shutterstock.  He was jeered at by the other members for selling his art at such ridiculous prices.  Not by me, cause I got curious (and I never regretted it).

sjlocke called and said to spread the word 

I knew since 2002-03 but where very skeptical about it...

Then my regular RM sales started dropping and I decided to give MS a try...

bye!

I'm going to quote Perry's post because it could have been written by me as my story is exactly the same. I posted a lot in the old request forum at IS and after a while I saw a request for an illustration of something that I thought would be fun to draw. I had Illustrator on my computer already, but had never taken the time to learn it past very basic skills, and my attempt at this particular requested item was shot down (*gasp*!). My other two application pieces had been really bad scans of inkjet prints of items I had created in Adobe Dimensions (anyone remember that? LOL). Not surprisingly, they didn't like these either. For my second application attempt, I pulled out some old charcoal drawings I had done and scanned those in. I combined them with a passable vector that had been part of a rejected client logo. I was accepted.

At that time, if you were accepted, you were accepted, and you were automatically approved to upload vector, photos, or flash files, regardless of what your application had contained. Vectors were all one price, and they and flash were the cheapest things on the site. My how times have changed. 

In 2004 was listening to NPR while driving my daughter to preschool. The story was about musicians making a bit of money with a site they uploaded their work and some of the conversation was about micropayments. My brothers are musicians so I went to their web site to find out more and forward it to him. BitPass was the micropayment site they used and I looked at what other businesses were using those payments. iStockphoto.com was one so I thought I'd see what that was about. When I read about it I thought I'd see if they'd accept my photos and thus the journey started.

After about 6 weeks they rejected a file I really liked and I got an article via e-mail that talked about other stock sites. That led me to start uploading to Shutterstock (which was just experimenting with getting FTP working and Jon was still doing a lot of the inspecting himself), CanStock and Dreamstime.

What???  No one found out about microstock through a college football team fan forum, like me?  Wow...I'm shocked.   

[shameless OU Sooners plug]

www.soonerfans.com

[/shameless OU Sooners plug]

I saw it on TV it was "Get Rich" info-commercial .

The name of the show was, "Every Monkey with a Camera Can Get Rich." Just buy a PHD [Push Here Dummy} camera and join a Micro Stock Agency. They are looking any picture of dogs, cats, kids, mailbox, and Uncle Harry. You can get rich , live the good life and travel around the country! Please send $24.95 and we will rush out our CD to you today!