If you want to make money selling commercial stock to companies you need producers who create what the normal hobby photographer doesn�t do.

To invest in shooting with models, on location etc...all the useful images, customers like to buy, the photo crowd doesn�t do that.

Artsy pictures are great as prints on the wall but won�t fill an industrial manual, illustrate a medical journal etc...

You need professionals to supply that.

Well, I know quite a few of those professionals who provide that kind of images. But it's been a while since I've seen any of them posting on MSG. And they are typically not the ones stating how much of a loss it will be to a new agency when they don't get to upload their 30k pre-keyworded, non-exclusive images.

Quote from: MarcvsTvllivs on March 28, 2016, 07:32

Weirdly enough they do appear to read IPTC, as it seems to heavily influence the keyword suggestions they are giving. They don't outright import IPTC though, making the result pretty much the same as if they had no IPTC implementation at all.

That is weird. I guess that means they are not interested in attracting dedicated photographers as their contributors. Otherwise I do not see how one can add sizeable portfolio without necessity of manually keywording every single image.

Yes, you are misunderstanding what EyeEm actually is and how it works. First and foremost it's an image sharing community, just like Instagram. They don't have any "keywords", they have "albums" and "missions". In this context having keywords like "isolated on white" don't make much sense. The Market is just an attachment to the community like it is on 500px, only a subset of users are uploading to the market. I have found that the majority of platforms based on mobile communities (Twenty20, Foap) are set up completely different than what we are used to know from traditional agencies. They all struggle with efficient mass upload procedures.

Then again, when you submit images to the EyeEm Market, they are being keyworded internally by EyeEm before being sent over to Getty and Alamy. So there is also no need to keyword your images to the detail. I would submit the most important keywords as albums like specific locations or the name of a fruit or object to provide the keyworders with that information but don't overdo by trying to add 50 keywords (albums) to each of your images individually.

so, is your stocksy earning in proportion to your ss 300/3000

On average on Stocksy I make about 30% of the royalties I make on Shutterstock. So the return per image is much higher on Stocksy. But it's really hard to compare because my portfolio on Stocksy is still so small that the royalties make huge jumps. One month I get only Small and Medium sales for $5 or $12.50 each; another month I get an Extended License for $275. So there is a lot of randomness in the earnings in Stocksy for me.

Sorry to disappoint, but no Getty deals on the horizon.

The horizon isn't the line between two rows in a spreadsheet.

Hello anybody uploading to eyeem and colourbox? i have around 33k on the big sites and i am really pleased with the results..so just wanted to know if it is worth the effort on uploading on them. Thanks

I really don't understand this kind of mentality: You are bringing up agencies on both end of the scale - Colourbox is basically a subscription-at-cheapest-prices-only agency. The average return is below �0.30 per download for me. And with EyeEm/Getty you are planning to sell the same images on the high level of prices with up to $500 for the largest version?

I am trying to supply images to all price levels of the market but I keep a huge difference in the images I sell. Sending masses of images to all markets doesn't sound like a promising strategy for me. The kind of images that sell through EyeEm and Getty that I see on social media are not the typical microstock images; and the typical images that sell in premium collections are not the ones that tend to make high returns in microstock.

I would suggest you first find out what market you shoot for before defining the best distribution channels for those images.

I was making a joke because mine don't show until the 10th or later and sometimes run into the next month before all are reported. Some day IS will move into the 21st century and report same or next day, like the rest. Slow pay, low pay, money won't make us happy.

Oh, it will happen. It's probably part of the redesign of the website they announced in 2010. I'm just waiting for them to implement it. 

I have been told by a very excited friend that Instagram is the thing to have for promoting your images. Just would like your opinions here as to how useful it is for your microstock or even selling privately etc ? To my first impressions it seems more geared around mobile phone users of which I am not. I have an ipad but find that impractical for taking shots. I just feel swamped with options that seem to all be doing pretty much the same thing like Twitter, Pinetrest and Instagram.

I've been having a love-hate affair with Instagram for the last three years or so. I am closing in on 3,000 followers after spending a lot of time and effort into the community building and learning (*blatant self promotion* http://instagram.com/michaeljberlin )

However, you can not add clickable links to your descriptions, the website you mention in your profile is the only exception; and you don't get people to copy and paste a text URL into their browsers. I have tried a couple of times with different methods but I rarely received more than 1 or 2 measurable hits through Instagram. For comparison: When I post a link on my Facebook page (with less than 1,000 followers), I get between 30 and 200 clicks on those links depending on the content. So Instagram definitely isn't good for promoting content you have outside of Instagram.

There is a bunch of people who started using Instagram early on and found a huge following (100k or more users) but typically not on their own but because they were promoted as "users to follow" or in the blog of Instagram themselves. Those people have a number of followers that is big enough to serve as marketing channel, and they occasionally get booked for shoots as part of a social media campaign.

Then there are certainly some people who focus on images that look good in print. I can imagine that if you offer your images for print and have a huge follower base, you can sell a decent amount of prints.

Third way of using Instagram productively in my opinion is to have it as a reference portfolio. I just started a secondary account with only my people images (*blatant self promotion, part 2* http://instagram.com/mjberlin_people ) which I can now easily show to models or have potential models follow me on there. Maybe at a certain point I might be able to also use it to get into new agencies that require sample portfolios. But I have strong doubts that any potential customer is going to find me with that account and hire me to do a shoot. It might happen randomly but the odds are one in a thousand or less.

So, final conclusion: I use Instagram to share images that I like, without consideration if they are usable for stock or not; I use Instagram to get a feeling which of my images get more or less likes, conclusions about "popularity" can be drawn from that which does not necessarily translate to sales in stock, though; thirdly, I use Instagram as a source for inspiration, to get an idea what looks interesting in cities I travel to, and follow the development of image processing style which I can also use for my stock work.

I think that you are right, as gross income = total revenue � cost of goods sold the thread title should have been "How much total revenue did you earn doing stock in 2015?"

Well, technically as a stock photographer I would say our "cost of goods sold" is by definition 0. Because all efforts we make are investments to future sales but not directly related to the sale itself. The only ones among us who actually have "cost of goods sold" are the ones who sell directly and pay transaction fees or have customer support related efforts. 

You're right, I don't have to pay VAT under reverse charge, but I have to report it. And for that, if I ever get audited, I need a valid invoice (or credit note if issued by Alamy) that has both my and Alamy's VAT ID on it. That's what I don't have, and that's why I am worried. But there isn't really anything I can do besides not get audited.

So what do you do if you have a customer from a different EU country licensing an image directly? You write an invoice on your computer and make a copy of that for your own accounting, don't you? You don't expect the customer to write that invoice for you, do you?

Why don't you do the same for Alamy then? And put the credit note as an addendum to it.

when we submit camera photos, we submit it as jpeg. do mobile phones have a different file type or is it also jpeg???
if so, how would ss reviewer know if it is a mobile photo or a camera photos?

Well, the EXIF data tells which camera has been used. Also it is rather obvious with most photos if they were shot with a dedicated camera with a larger sensor or with a mobile phone with a tiny fixed lens and small sensor.

You can shoot decent images with smart phones in good light conditions, though. And one of the advantages of small sensors is that almost everything is in focus. So no "focus issue" rejections for these images from Shutterstock.

OK, I'm too stupid to understand the connection between royalty cut and increased downloads.

In the past, Shutterstock has paid out a flat $28. Now they pay out a percentage. As a result, they now have no problems offering ELs to customers at much lower prices than before. It wouldn't have paid off for them selling ELs for $60 when they had to pay $28 in royalties, now they only have to pay $12-$18.

So obviously their hope is that with discounts they can get more of the buyers (back) that are using images to print post cards or calendars for resale who haven't been willing to pay $80-$100 per image for some time and get those image cheaper elsewhere.

Thanks. I signed up and I'm looking forwards to it. 

I just had my best day ever on Monday.