any old timers who have been doing this for a while willing to share their early experiences with some of us newer contributors?  curious about what it was like before digital and in the early days when digital cameras weren't great but the market was also unsaturated.

right, good call, it was just regular stock back then.  i didn't realize ss did the levels thing a while ago, did they just lower the thresholds in 2020?

Back in the day 2006-2018 If you had 10,000 images on Shutter, iStock and Fotolia/Adobe you were making some serious money! There was an unwritten rule--- 1,000 images equaled $200 a month per site. Thus 10,000 images equaled $2,000 per month per site. Thus you would be making well over $6,000 per month from the three main sites plus a few extra thousand from all the other smaller sites. So making $10,000 a month was very doable and many folks were making this! We had a few on this site that were making over $200,000 USD a year!  I used to work 18 hr days back than because it met more $$$ now today I hardly work because more images mean nothing. I truly miss those days.

right, good call, it was just regular stock back then.  i didn't realize ss did the levels thing a while ago, did they just lower the thresholds in 2020?

The old levels were lifetime earnings, and not this ridiculous annual reset.

You got 25c to start, then 33c, 36c and finally 38c. To get 38c, you had to have over $10,000 earnings.

Of course, this awful new system meant that those with $10k earnings were hit the hardest, with a drop from 38c to 10c per subscription download.

Back in the day, you also got $2.85 for an On Demand sale at Shutterstock, and $28 for an EL. On Demand sales used to be about every 7th download on average. These days, they hardly exist, and I recently got an EL that earned me $3 in commission, so the customer paid $10.

If I could turn the clocks back at Shutterstock, I would do so in a heartbeat, as it's become a shadow of its former self.

At least Adobe is picking up the slack, and has become the 'go to' site for both sales and service. Let's hope that lasts for a long time to come.

The unwritten rule --- 1,000 images equaled $200 a month per site.  That person said you should get $.20 per image per month.

 Cannot remember who said but they were a microstock author (wrote a few books) as well. Their rule was pretty good at the time in the hey day of microstock.

It was the easiest money I ever made, and it was a lot of fun.

Fantastic people as well!

I can relate to what Tom said, including wishing I'd done more with microstock back then.

I started in 2008 with shutterstock and Alamy.

Even with a small portfolio on shutterstock I was seeing daily downloads all over the world and moving up - back then the levels were based on lifetime earnings so it was slower but it made a bigger difference. It was a blow to go from the top level to starting all over again each year. 

I believe ss had 6 million images when I started and I loved the idea that someone found mine and licensed them when there were so many to choose from. It seemed mind-blowing when they hit 8 million LOL. The competition has grown so much that I suppose it's more mind-blowing now that our images are found in that enormous sea, and not surprising they get found less and less. SS was often my best agency "back in the day," now it is consistently my worst.

My stock photo income rose steadily everywhere until around 2015, my best year on nearly all of the sites, and stayed pretty steady through 2017 when it leveled out or fell. Alamy has come close to the 2015 peak in most recent years, but I have twice as many images as I did in 2015, so I've been running to stay in place. ss has crashed. DT was never great but I made payout a few to several times a year, now it's closer to once every 18 months or more.

The only exception is Adobe, which, when it was fotolia, was my worst performer, and I left. I started again with Adobe in mid-2015 and my earnings have grown steadily, with a big jump up 40% last year (from 2022 earnings to 2023).

I have small portfolios, some under 1,000 images, so I'm not a full time stock photographer like many on here, but that's my experience FWIW.

The unwritten rule --- 1,000 images equaled $200 a month per site.  That person said you should get $.20 per image per month.

 Cannot remember who said but they were a microstock author (wrote a few books) as well. Their rule was pretty good at the time in the hey day of microstock.

The unwritten rules were for a select few, and most of them are BS. $2 RPI is one of them, that is quoted, but not for all. Yes, for some people, who had really good work and concepts and collections, maybe. But for everyone else, it was just, RPD and not big numbers.

Mostly under $1 downloads. Yes, averages, distort that, because for example, I could get one EL a month which was $28. But the bulk of the downloads were more around 50� on average and that was at 33 cents on AS or 36� on SS, less DLs but 50� on IS.

It's like saying, look at all the money Elvis, the Stones, or Taylor Swift make on streaming. (dead Elvis estate still make good money) I should become a musician and do streaming music. Not so fast. I have a friend who does that. Records session in Nashville or other major studios, posts to a number of his own sites and promotes and makes CDs and is streaming. His general earnings, he says, could fill the gas tank on his car, sometimes.

Microstock is no different. You buy the equipment or in my case already have it. You shoot, edit, upload, and sit back and wait for that commission money to come rolling in.  I have many, individual and good images. (the whole how many is also flawed, if I had 20 of every shoot, I'd have 20,000 images!) I usually upload one, maybe two. Number of images does not = # of dollars. 1,000 images, didn't = $2 RPI or any reasonably expected level of earnings. 1,000 really good images, suitable for stock, yes, maybe.

Yeah, truth is, everything was better until about 2012. Some people made more on referrals, than selling their images. Agencies, all of them, had levels and a reason to do better and make more. What most people tend to forget is, SS was the last one to give is the crappy, new improved, system. One by one, they dropped levels or adjusted them. They all dropped referrals, or limited the time, which ended all the oldest. All of them changed the searches to feature newer images. If there were things that favored older accounts, that benefit was taken away. I don't mind, fair equal surface for everyone.

But, every agency, except Adobe, cut commissions or ways to make more by working harder, and most eliminated just about all incentives. At the same time they introduced API sellers and partners, who got everything for less and we got a lower commission, for a lower value, which means, downloads dropped and value of what we did get, also dropped. Whether they call it connect or something else, we have been farmed out the back door, for pennies.

Hell yes, it was different and better. 

Quote from: Sean Locke Photography on April 20, 2024, 10:25

There were a couple years when I paid more than $100k in income taxes

You were one of the big guns back than! King of iStock to us mortals --- You and LisaFX even helped me to pass the iStock test.

Oh Yeah, there's something else that changed. 

Yes, there used to be a test on some sites, reading and understand was part, but then passing the photo standards or illustration standards test. Now you give a fake name, from some third world country and a fake email address, and upload thousands of stolen images, and you're a contributor. 

They even required IDs, which is funny for the people that squawked, why do they need my ID and information. Ha, now we see why? But that doesn't matter anymore.

No test, sketchy IDs, just upload the files and the agency is happy. Oh wait, I remember the good old days, when the reviewers were humans, not AI.  And the bad old days when you could get some reviewer who based on their opinion, our images had no commercial value, so they just rejected everything.

 i started in stock in the 70s - in those days you would send your slides to the agency.    clients would submit a request and the agency would physically go to their files to select slides that might work and send those to the client.  each agency had their own filing system and most of the knowledge was what the staff remembered.

the big problem was your slides might spend most of their time being sent to different clients w/o ever making a sale and the companies often didnt make duplicates as there was a lot of quality loss with slider dupes.  footage was probably even more difficult to deal with. 

the upside was you'd get $100 - $500+ per slide accepted. (but total I made per year was less than I made in the high times of microstock which I started in 2006)

in the 90s i worked with a Seattle agency that was one of the first to sell CDs with images - they'd put 100 640x480 images on a disc & sell for $150-$300!

Bottom Line:   Second Law of Thermodynamics,  loosely interpreted as "Everything eventually goes to shite",  applies to Microstock as well

I didn�t experience the days before digital but I was an iStock video exclusive from 2008 until 2014. I got into doing Stock when I was a freelance motion graphics and vfx artist. I was struggling to juggle deadlines with parenting toddlers and Stock was a life saver for me. The final straw was when I was working on graphics for a TV show that was live on air at 8pm and it was 6pm and the producers were still sending through changes they needed, and my 2-year-old had chicken pox. He was sitting on the floor of my home office crying miserably and I couldn�t leave what I was doing to comfort him. After that I decided I had to do something less deadline-focused. I feel so lucky to have found Stock in its heyday as it enabled me to fit my work around being a mum/mom, and still earn the same amount as before. (Obviously that is no longer the case, but it was good while it lasted.)