i would check out Dreamstime and Fotolia first, as they don't have an aplication to start submitting.  Shutterstock is hard to get into but they sell really well.  You will only see any amount of sales from the 'big 6' and the farther you go down the list on the right the less sales you will see.  With 10 images you may never see a sale on anything below the 'new sites' label.

It says they pay 25 cents per download....  Does that mean someone can download a picture and use it in their publication for just 25 cents ??

The 25 cents is what you get, not what the customer pays.

Basically, there are pay-per-download models and subscription models. Pay per download means the customer is paying a certain amount for each single image, in most cases depending on size. Subscription model means the customer pays a fixed monthly, quarterly or annual fee and gets to download x images per day or month for that money, in most cases this is independent of size.

A subscription model might be that the customer pays $250 for a month and gets 25 downloads a day. So if he would use all his available downloads, he would pay $0.33 per image. But maybe the customer only uses 10 downloads per day on average, so he would only get 300 downloads at $0.83 each.

You will easily note that hardly anybody can make use of so many images each day, so many customers most likely buy those images to keep a personal archive for potential future use. Maybe your image will be downloaded but never get used. Maybe it will end up as a cover of a large national magazine. You can't tell.

Hi

You can check out my website to read up on some infor on the various microstock you can consider joining.

http://www.freewebs.com/mygardenofeden/ 

Cheers
Peiling

Hi Krusty,

I am with Photonation. They are lovely friendly people, but the stuff they mainly sell is editorial. They are used a lot by the BBC and national newspapers. It costs something like �12 (cannot really remember but it was not much,just a token amount) to have your pictures on the site. I am trying it for a year, but at the current rate of sales I won't renew it when it runs out

Hi Krusty, I second what Clivia says (apart from the not renewing my annual fee!). You guys are talking about picturenation.co.uk here I assume? Just to get the name right. Certainly most of my sales have been from editorial pictures, but that just relects my port there. Couldn't speak for any other contributors.  Sales have been slow of late but I know they are very committed to building their business and commission is higher (�30 for a high res sale). Certainly I have made far more on PN over the last couple of years than on other sites but then I only started with istock last year and only got in to shutterstock last week (two sales already on a handful of pictures). The great thing is that you are free to sell the same pictures through multiple sites so see which ones work for you. Good luck! Regards, David