You have a tiny portfolio alp. You need to build up a port of a few thousand files before it becomes really interesting. Also on some agencies you need a lot of time, for your images to move up in their search ranking. So I don�t really understand why you closed your account with fotolia and deposit. If you have 2000 files online and few sales I understand, but not 160 files in a sea of 20 million or more.

If you really want to just upload a few images here and there and not work with other agencies you might want to consider going exclusive with istock, inspite of all the drama that has been going on there.

The prices are higher and your files will be preferred in the search.

In the end it is up to you. You will get out of the stock market what you put into it, like any other business. Many people posting here do it as a full time day job and just treat their online webshops as a normal webstore, which is what they are in the end.

Good luck!

There are HUGE differences in the size of the agencies, i.e. the number of customers they service. You can look at the webtraffic of the different sites to get an idea for how many people they reach.

But of course the price and the quality of customers is also important. there are smaller agencies like Alamy, getty etc...that serve only a small prt of the market, but their prices are higher. So maybe you will only get a download once a month or once every 6 months when you are starting out, but you will get 50, 100 or 200 dollars.

It all takes time.

The most important is to decide who are your customers, and where do you think will they buy? What is your target group and target theme?

But if you send in 30-50  images a week to several agencies and just do this steadily for a year you will see which agencies work best for you.

In terms of sales volume, yes, much smaller. Just look at their web traffic or the number of files sold on getty versus the number of files licensed on istock, Thinkstock or Shutterstock.

They have higher prices and maybe higher revenue than Shutterstock. But you don�t know that because they do not break down the revenue for the individual agencies. So it could be that their 950 million total revenue is split something like this: 600 million istock/thinkstock/jupiter, 200 million getty editorial and only 150 million Getty creative.

It could also be any other combination, as long as they don�t publish, you don�t know. The last number we heard was again in 2007/2008 that istock was around 400 million somewhere. Today this might be more or less, or Thinkstock might have taken a lot of that. 

But the traffic tells you how many customers go to a company to license a file. And the number of licenses is much, much lower than on istock or Shutterstock.

For the artist, the only important thing is how much money is the agency paying out in total to the artists. Shutterstock just announced it was around 50 million in 2012. In 2008 Kelly Thompson said istock paid out around 95 million a year (1.8 million a week). So Shutterstock has grown a lot. And if you look at the depressing monthly sales threads on istock it is hard to imagine they are still paying out 95 million a year to artists. Maybe what they pay out is now less then what Shutterstock pays out. Again, we don�t know, but I think it is fair to assume that with the drastically falling traffic and reports on the forums that all artists combined are earning a lot less than before.

Alamy had a total revenue of 22 million and pays out 50%. So in terms of revenue for the artist they are quite interesting for such a small place.

Getty has less revenue than istock/thinkstock, so they must be paying out much less to their artists. But they presumably have less artists, so I guess for the few people who are in, it is enough.

All data, pulled from internet or what I heard on public events over the years, don�t pin me down on the single dollar.

With Getty I mean Gettyimages itself, not the whole Getty universe of God knows how many agencies they own. Getty also sells a lot via partner sites around the globe, so Gettycreative from Gettyimages itself might be quite a small number.

Again you don�t know. But when they got sold last year, they said total revenue over everything was 950 million, so that is the upper limit. And istock was around 400 m. in 2008. So play around with the numbers, look at the traffic, compare sales prices and royalties. Make your own estimates and conclusions.

But for me, I am only interested in the number that goes to the artist. So an agency with a revenue of 100 million but only pays out 15% is less interesting than one with a revenue of 40 million that pays out 50%.

ETA: and because Shutterstock has such a huge number of customers it gives them a great basis to now open a high end agency like OFFSET. If they put a lot of eneryg in it - what will happen to Getty Creative in the next 12 months??

That is the advantage of having a huge and broad customer base. Gettycreative may have lots of high value customers, but they are extremly vulnerable if they lose one of them. There are only so many high end clients in the world.

I mentioned this in a different thread, but I keep a detailed record of images on each site and earnings from that site - by month and by year in my annual review.

Of course, this depends on the type of portfolio, but you will see how much I earn from each of them on my blog.

Steve

I've started on Dec 2012...
 I've deleted my files and closed my accounts

These two sentences combined are telling me that you are not realistic in your expectations. Stock photography is about long term thinking and consistency. If you expected to get rich in three months, then it's no wonder you are not happy.

When I started at iStockphoto it took about 18 months for my portfolio to make serious sales. And that was a few years ago when the libraries were much smaller and the competition not as strong as today.

There is no agency that will make you money in a short term. You can try higher priced agencies, but all you will find is that it might take six months to only get a first sale.

I'd say you need at least 1,000 images to earn some money on a regular basis. Get there and then wait at least for six months before judging which agencies are worth the effort or not.

Quote from: ruzgar344 on April 09, 2013, 10:40

I've started on Dec 2012...
 I've deleted my files and closed my accounts

These two sentences combined are telling me that you are not realistic in your expectations. Stock photography is about long term thinking and consistency. If you expected to get rich in three months, then it's no wonder you are not happy.

When I started at iStockphoto it took about 18 months for my portfolio to make serious sales. And that was a few years ago when the libraries were much smaller and the competition not as strong as today.

There is no agency that will make you money in a short term. You can try higher priced agencies, but all you will find is that it might take six months to only get a first sale.

I'd say you need at least 1,000 images to earn some money on a regular basis. Get there and then wait at least for six months before judging which agencies are worth the effort or not.

Thank you so much!! U are pro and I am only a poor amateur.. I appreciate your comments... Thank you very much again!!