I had a quick look at my stock image sales earlier today and to be honest I wish hadn’t. The results were very disheartening.Stock image sales were the first step on my journey to becomming a professional photographer several years ago. I opened an account with one of the larger stock libraries and posted a CD with my first submission, hoping that I fulfilled their quality criteria. Several weeks later I received notification that my images had been accepted. All 20 of them had passed the 48 different quality control checks that the library insisted on. Quite frankly I was amazed but really proud of myself too. I was so glad I’d taken the plunge.
Several weeks after that and a few submissions later I made my first image sale: a picture of a lump of coal. At $220 it wasn’t a big sale, but it was a sale nevertheless.
So I submitted more files and sold more images. Cool.
At the time the forums were filled with the chatter about stock libraries and a big war was being waged about the “traditional” stock libraries and the new “Micro” stock libraries. The biggest difference between them being the price the end customer pays for an image. For a traditional library the images would typically sell for $hundreds to $thousands. Micro stock was going against the industry norm and offering them for pennies. A huge, huge difference.
Unfortunately, the library I’m with has been steadily reducing their prices to the extent that I no longer believe it’s viable for me to submit. In fairness I haven’t submitted anything for about 3 years but as my last three sales have averaged about $7 each and the lowest sale last year was $0.49 I probably won’t be for some considerable time.
I think one of the problems with stock lbraries is that it’s definitely a numbers game. There are people out there who make an absolute fortune selling stock images but they are normally the ones who submit hundreds if not thousands of images each week, resulting in a large number of image sales. That takes a lot of time and dedication, plus knowing how the market works and which images sell.
Trouble is, I don’t think it’s for me.
So it’s adios stock imagery although I will be leaving the files there, to pick up the off $1 sale every now and then. You never know, after I’ve paid the 30% to 60% commission on the sale, converted it back to £ and paid tax on it I might have enough to buy a bag of crisps.
