For me, the last few years most of my sales on Getty have been basically micro stock prices. I stopped submitting to the micros seven or eight years ago (maybe longer) to focus on Getty, only to have Getty essentially turn into another micro. For years my sales on Getty were always in the hundreds of dollars per sale, but that changed a while ago and now most are micro prices. I'm not sure if this merger means anything, if it does, probably nothing good for us.

Man, I've been shooting micro stock since 2005, got into Getty in a limited fashion around 2006, then unlimited uploads for Getty around 2009, something like that. My sales reached their highest around 2016 and been getting less and less ever since. This last year sucked. in 2019 started selling prints on Etsy, just making up for the stock losses. 9 months ago started selling AI designs on Etsy. It's fun but no huge money maker for me. On balance, with stock and Etsy total, I'm still less than stock alone in 2016. I'm focusing on Etsy and starting AI stock to see where that's going but haven't shot any real photography for stock since 2018.

I have to agree with cobalt,

I've been shooting stock since 2005, and because my sales had been dropping and Getty ended up being no better that the microstocs, I stopped in 2019 to start selling fine art prints on Etsy. Then six months ago i started playing around in MidJourney and set up a second Etsy shop to sell AI generated art, (using the term art here very loosely.) I'm amazed what MidJourney can do, and more amazed by what it CAN'T do. $30 a month but hours and hours of time spent by designers, I don't think so. Most of my AI designs end up taking hours to fix in MidJourney and then in photoshop. Maybe 10% or less come out perfect or close to perfect from one prompt. Groups of people, lots of mangled looking faces and hands, oh the hands. Three legs, heads on backwards, weird looking eyes, and did I mention the hands? I have uploaded some AI stock to Adobe and none have been licensed yet after three months. Not expecting much. I don't know, I see the possibilities, the potential of AI art, but we are still pretty far from perfection. There are SO many non AI stock images, seems hard to believe most companies can't find what they're looking for already.

Thanks everybody. I've been shooting stock photography for some 15 years now, the main micros, Alamy and Getty Images. I just got really bored with it a few years ago and disgusted at how my income was falling every year. So during the pandemic I started an Etsy store selling fine art prints. Not a huge money make but picking up some slack from lower earning from stock. I recently started a second Etsy store selling "art" (using that term very loosely) from generated AI, MidJourney. Travel posters and other stuff. Those AI images are selling OK, but Etsy isn't a get rich quick scheme for most although some of the stores selling AI art have impressive sales in a short time. Anyhoo, I've been pondering AI stock and thought I'd get some feedback. Thanks again.

Just curious how people are doing selling AI stock. I've been playing around in MidJourney, having fun, considering trying to sell AI stock but wondering if I've already missed the boat? Are there already so many AI images available that it's not worth the time?

Citing AI as a reason, "Today of course everyone has a capable digital camera in their pocket, and the advent of AI means amazing images can be created for free from programs with just a few keywords. Decreased business and increasing costs has made it no longer possible to keep operating, to our great disappointment."

For what it's worth, I'm just opening an Etsy "gallery" selling prints of my work. Only have a few listing up so no info yet on how well it's doing. I would not sell digital downloads there, read too many horror stories. Too cheap, and actually selling prints can give you a higher profit margin than downloads in spite of the overhead and cost of shipping. I've read a number of forum posts where buyers on balance prefer to buy prints over digital downloads anyway so they don't have to go through the effort of printing. There are printing companies that do drop shipping for photographers so photogs don't have to package and mail the prints. Just my two cents.

I'm reviving this old thread. I've been forgoing micro stock for the last few years and focusing on Getty because I was earning much higher sales at Getty, and a better RPI. Suddenly, the last three months have been nothing but micro stock level sales. Last month, one image sold for 72 cents and my take was 14 cents, on Getty images, not iStock. I couldn't find much discussed about this on the Getty forums. Just curious if other Getty shooters here have noticed a recent change in sales. I'm used to a fair number of 200 to 500 dollar sales every month, now my biggest is under 20, most around $1.25.

Alamy is dead for me, has been for years. 2600 images and i've had 3 sales this year and a whopping 13 last year. My 2 best years were in 2010 and 2011 when I had 91 and 87 sales. All the same images that I have on the micros, but I've done much better with the micros than I ever did with Alamy.

Happened to me with Dreamtime. The image was a low earner, only had made a few bucks in years, and I think the sale was 800, of which I got 400. Had to remove the image from all other sites, and any similars. It was worth it. The image was of handcuffs which was used for the book cover "Fifty shades Freed." Dreamtime didn't let me know what the image was going to be used for. If I had known I might have asked for more. Funny,  a few months later I was strolling through Costco and saw the book and realized it was my image. 

Reiterating what raciro said,

Yea, the "good ol' days" in micro are gone (at least for me) so I'm not sure what it takes to do well anymore. Too many images available and lots of copying. images seem to have a shelf life too, so you're always trying to stay ahead of the wave (the bell curve) of image interest fall off.

I used to make around $1400 per month with about 2000 images. Now I have around 3500 images and don't make anywhere near that. I don't shoot as much as I used to and when I do it exclusively goes to Getty, only what they reject goes to micro. But Getty is not the same agency they used to be. I'm getting mostly "micro" priced sales from Getty nowadays but Getty still overall beats my old micro RPI. (Barely) I just don't have many images on Getty. I'm dabbling in video, did a few time-lapse, but those seem labor intensive to me.

If you're good enough maybe trying to get in with a macro agency like Stocksy might be an alternative but I think they're fairly selective. I've seen some great stuff on Stocksy.

Part time stock shooter. Rarely check my stock sites. Just recently discovered the "See in action" selection on Dreamtime, started going through my images to see where they have been used. Came across a book cover, apparently a new York Times best seller (although that doesn't really mean much.) Anyway, they credited my image to someone else. I couldn't find a website for a photographer with that name so apparently it was deceit. My first inclination was to just shrug it off, not much can be done now. Would any of you reading this do anything? I was thinking of contacting the publisher.

I should add, it varies on experience as well. You get what you pay for, 'been my experience.

It depends. Many people don't pay models because they do TFP/CD (time for print and / or CD) so the compensation are "portfolio" images for the models book. Where you live makes a difference, Los Angeles, New York, or some small town in the mid west. Personally i always thought the TFCD was not particularly fair (for the models) or good long term business plan but lots of people have never paid their models. I'm in Los Angeles and I haven't found a lot of reliable and good (experienced) lifestyle models for free (TFP), but in fairness I haven't shot a lot of lifestyle / people photography. Smaller agencies might expect $200 per hour with a half day minimum plus expenses. Less experienced models might be found for $25/hr-$60/hour.

My old 8mp images I uploaded 10 years ago still sell. I went from 8mp to 12 to 16. I'm still shooting and submitting 16mp images to all the micros but mostly Getty, virtually all get accepted. I keep talking myself out of a new, higher mp camera because it probably won't increase my sales any, not enough to pay for itself.

RF123 has always been one of my lowest earners since I started in 2005. They range about 1/5 of iStock earnings and about 1/10 of shutter stock's earnings, with the same images. January was my biggest month in 2016, but that isn't saying much. 1600 images and I earned a whopping $146.00 the whole year. I should say I don't submit much to micro anymore, and haven't for three or four years. I think my images are reaching the end of their shelf life. 

Maybe this has been suggested before, but I think it would helpful if the Poll Results differentiated between photos and video licenses. I'm assuming Pond 5 ranks as high as it does because of mostly video whereas i'm guessing other sites might be more equally divided between video and photo licenses. I'm also guessing that not all photographers are submitting video, perhaps most photographers aren't? Anyone else concur? Maybe it would be too time consuming / complicated to separate the earnings for some contributors.

Just out of curiosity, for those of you who are Stocksy photographers, what is your image acceptance rate? I have images with the micros and separately with Getty and my acceptance with the micros has always been very good. Acceptance of images with Getty, via their Moments collection, very hit and miss, sometimes great, often not so much. For every ten images you send Stocksy, how many do they accept? Just average or estimate would be great.

Thanks

QuoteI have well over 1,000 images on GI as a house contributor. I have made my living full time from stock for 25+ years. I have worked for some top name magazines as a regular contributor. I have done several ad campaigns. I have won awards for my work. I have coffee table books to my credit

The fact that you would bother with micro stock in the first place baffles me.

My sales are dismal across the board and have been steadily dropping since 2010. My best year was 2009 and sales in 2014 were half what they were in 2009. I don't have 9K images, but around 2500. IS sales dropped in half from 2010 to 2011.  The only site that hasn't dropped in sales, until this year, is SS. 

QuoteAll sites are down. The golden days of microstock are over since at least two years. Shouldn't everybody in this forum know that by now?

Yea, my biggest drop happened in 2013.

QuoteYou have to factor in that alamy don't reject on non-technical grounds, other sites might reject half of those images for things like similars or LCV.  Perhaps he could make more money with the micro stock sites but I find uploading editorial and the sort of images that no longer sell on the micros to just alamy saves time and its great to have a source of income that isn't microstock.

That is a good point. Probably the only place to upload unrealesed people shots (other than celebs) and make some money from them. I upload everything I have on the micros to Alamy along with images that were rejected by the micros or is editorial. Fortunately I have a pretty high acceptance rate on the micros so I really don't factor that. Roughly about 13% of my sales on Alamy are from images that are not available on the micros, mostly landscapes that I decided to license as RM. So the vast majority of my sales on Alamy are the same images that are on the micros. But I do mostly commercial / conceptual still life, very different than KM's images, he has a TON of unreleased people shots, so it's probably apple to oranges here.

From the Alamy blog interview with Keith Morris, the example Alamy provided on this forum: "After selling $250k worth of stock photography online with Alamy recently..." Keith has 27,000 files and that $250,000 in sales is total sales, based on the sentence in quotes, not his percentage after Alamy takes out their cut. After taking out Alamy's cut wouldn't Keith's average return per image per year be around 50 cents?  That doesn't sound that great to me. My percentage on Alamy isn't that much lower than Keith's and my images are mediocre at best. (By the way, I think Keith's images are pretty good, definitely has some beautiful stuff, this is not meant to disparage Keith in any way.)

I have fared much better on istock alone than on Alamy. I submit to Alamy, but I've never had great success relative to the micros collectively or istock and Shutter Stock alone. My RPI is best with Getty but I have less than 200 images with them. My sales with Alamy mirror the micro stock poll results to the right.

Though I was wrong about the duplicate keywords (although I'm sure that information was correct many years ago) I think it still holds true that your images and pseudonym needs time to percolate up in the search results, however I wouldn't expect anything too great from Alamy.

I was wrong, sorry about that.

I'll be honest with you, I couldn't find that info about the duplicate keywords. It may be very dated info. I remember this being discussed at length many years ago, things may have changed. I haven't been a very active contributor the last five years, I just upload a few images here and there. I emailed member services. I apologize If I spoke out of my ass, I will post Alamy's replay.

I've read, and my experience with Alamy seems to concur, (10 years with Alamy) it takes a year for your images to work their way up in the search rankings to a point where you get regular sales. Also, if you have many similar images with similar keywords, it would behove you to divide those images up into a number of different pseudonyms. Your search ranking can be affected by to many similar images. However, once you create a new pseudonym, it will "restart" the ranking for that pseudonym, so it will be on the bottom so to speak. So if you're going to break up your images into various pseudonyms, you should do it now rather than later before your ranking start to climb. Also, make sure you have NO duplicate words in your keywords. I'm sure you're familiar with how strict Alamy is with their word spamming algorithm, but this can't be overstated. Make sure there are no duplicate keywords in the "essential" "main" and "comprehensive" keywords fields. You can have the same words in the caption field. Unlike some of the micro sites, Alamy doesn't automatically delete the duplicates keywords. And as already stated, if an image is on another site as RF, it has to be RF on Alamy, cannot be RM. All this is based on things I've read from Alamy and from other Alamy contributors so take it for what it's worth. Maybe it's all BS. I know back in 2009 I re-keyworded all my images to weed out duplicate words (I'm a very lazy keyworder) and the following year my sales tripled. However, I did the same thing again a few months ago and haven't seen any uptick in sales yet, might be too soon to tell, so. Hope this helps a little.
-David