I have been contributor in iStock since November 2007. At the beginning all was at its best, I uploaded lots of photos and my sales increased. Then I became exclusive and my sales kept growing from 80 files per month in June 2008 to 120 in January 2009. But on February 17th, my sales dropped from an average of 5/day to less than 1 per day. Since then I could not sell more than 2 files per day and last week was dreadful with only 8 files sold.
I worked hard to upload 500 files - in fact 1000 because 50% files are rejected - and when I began to earn some money, they threw me out of the window.

Impossible to know why my sales dropped in one night. The support says that it’s because the quality of other contributors has increased, but if you look at the database, you dont see a significant quality increase and anyway the quality on the files could not increase 10 fold in one single night, on February 17th.

What they did with me? They used my files to draw traffic via Google, then paying me only 25% of the price and when I could earn some money they pushed my sales down. In iStock there are some happy few who sell 300 files a day or more and earn several thousand Dollars per month. These contributors are protected and most customers are directed to these contributors. The new ones see their best files rejected when they risk to compete with those of the happy few, I was here only to make volume and to attract people from the net. Other contributors took the money and iStock makes fantastic profits without any risk.

I do have one question… has anybody here tried selling through photographers direct?
On the face of it it would appear that earnings could be a lot higher there, but that depends if anything actually sells.
I would appreciate any input

Craig

I have been monitoring about 10 photographers on Dreamstime for the last months, all of them with more than 2000 approved files. Downloads: around 120 each, most of them uploading constantly for the last 2 years. So upload weekly for 2 years to make 100$ a month of it. Ridicolous.

Dear dphotojournal, you must have incredible photos, to say the least to pull in 1365$ from Dreamstime in september with 1100 files, roughly 1000 downloads let’s say. That is a huge rate on Dreamstime in my opinion. I know it is possible, of course, but from what i have come to know and from other bloggers and microstock diaries, out of the 200.000 “photographers” registered with microstock websites only 1500 or so make more than 2000$/month (considering ALL the sites thay sell on)and the number is decreasing as more people take a piece of the pie each day.

Bitter i am, i know

Thanks again and showing your earnings was a great incentive too.

Why will Photographers Direct not represent photographers who have images on microstock / micropayment sites?

Because they are the antithesis of Fair Trade Photography. Microstock sites (which sell Royalty Free images for 1 to 50 dollars) prey on the lack of industry-experience of amateur photographers.

The only people who benefit from these sites are:
The site owners, because they make money from the images and do not care about the damage they are doing to professional photographers’ livelihoods.

The buyers, who cannot believe their luck at being able to get images for a few dollars, and being able to use them as often as they like, for as long as they like, wherever they like.
The people who lose out every time are the photographers. Almost every photographer we have spoken to on this issue has expressed regret at placing their images on microstock sites. Initially they are excited at people taking an interest in their images and paying for them. Of course they like making an income from their images, but here are the facts:

The average fee for an image licensed through Photographers Direct is about 200 dollars, of which the photographer will receive 160 dollars. Images have been licensed for up to 5000 dollars. These license fees are usually for a single usage, not a Royalty Free license. The photographer can license the same image again and again for similar fees.

To make the same average amount through a microstock site you will have to sell anywhere between 200 and 800 images. These images can be used anywhere at any time and cannot realistically be traced. You are not ’selling’ your images, you are not ‘having success’; you are giving away your images, and the buyers cannot believe their luck.

Imagine the day when you see one of your images on a book or magazine cover. You will probably be very happy and proud, until you realise you earned a dollar from an image that is helping to generate possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars in publishing sales. Is this fair?

The microstock myth is that this does not happen, that images off microstock sites are only used by designers for initial layouts and by ‘mom and pop’ businesses who would never pay more for images. If this were true, then shouldn’t the license reflect it? If you are only paying a few dollars for an image, then it should only be allowed for personal use, a blog, or for businesses with less than 4 employees, for example. However the licenses are open ended. You pay a couple of dollars and you can use the image for anything, for all time. It could be for a billboard advert, a magazine cover, a tv spot.

But does this really happen? Yes it does, and what is painfully ironic is that microstock photographers love to boast about where they have found their images published. Once they have got over the excitement of seeing their work in print, they need to step back, take another look at that paycheck, and think ‘Is that all my work is worth?’