Hi all,

I've been a sports photographer for over 15 years.
Seen everything from the Champions league, world cups to formula 1. Currently, i only have around 1.000 images stored on Shutterstock and in the last 5 years earned around 9.000 USD of them.
I'm just curious. What are your experiences with selling these photos on microstock sites? and which are working out for you.

I have some on Dreamstime selling only a few each year so not worth the time, to be honest.
Currently, I'm thinking of uploading a big part of my history on ShutterStock and hopefully others to make some money off my back catalog.

That's interesting. I tried in last years to push editorial motor sport and other international sports events to microstock.
Not super top events, no Formula 1, but still international events like world championship, european championship, global motor sports category.

After last four years results has been lower than expected: I can't say I get nothing, but I get much more from "microstock oriented" images than from editorial events themselves.

For example, you can sell more an asphalt close up background on motor sport track than a scenic Ferrari racing.

So my answer is yes, it's worth to upload, and no, it's not worth to shoot for specific events. In my experience you can use the events to take unique images, but you will not sell the classic panning of car on tracks. Or, probably, you will sell some, and you will have rare occasional high value sales.
But the best results will be with general, microstock oriented, racing concept images, If you have that, I suggest to go on. At the contrary I don't think it worth to spend time to work on and keywording on classical editorial sport events images.