Microstock.. making money

[shank_ali]

Now i have been a ' happy snapper' for about 2 years now.
In those two years however i have made over $3000.
Microstock is booming.. Shutterstock and Getty/Istockphoto are the two biggest players.
Pop along and apply to be a contributors.
WARNING : All your work will be inspected at 100 %.Can you handle rejection ?
http://www.istockphoto.com/shank_ali

[creid]

Is this spam perchance?? $3000 over 2 years is pretty paltry when you consider the amount of effort required to get stock photos accepted... Face it, FlickR has just passed the 4,000,000,000 upload mark, add to that CC licensing and it's just not worth the effort on behalf of client or tog unless it's something very specialised. Long gone are the days when a tog could make a living off stock..

Carl

[chris-p]

Looks like spam to me which is why it's been ignored.

[shank_ali]

I bought my first DSLR camerain MAY 2007.
I have only been shooting just over two years and a very basic understanding of Adobe.Hence the term 'happy snapper'
Istock or any other stock agent does not need it's members to advertise the site.It has over 65,000 contributors worldwide.
The post was to make aware to members that it is possable to make money on line from taking photographs.
Thats all !

[creid]

Originally Posted by shank_ali

I bought my first DSLR camerain MAY 2007.
I have only been shooting just over two years and a very basic understanding of Adobe.Hence the term 'happy snapper'
Istock or any other stock agent does not need it's members to advertise the site.It has over 65,000 contributors worldwide.
The post was to make aware to members that it is possable to make money on line from taking photographs.
Thats all !

My point stands then, it takes a lot of effort, tweaking etc to get micro stock accepted and frankly the return of (for us Brits) of "possibly" £1500 over 2 years is not than tempting when you weigh it up against the time and effort involved. Way back when (before everybody in the world had a DSLR), pro togs could make a comfortable living off stock (I seem to recall Bryan Peterson quoting he made $10000 from one photo of a bridge), those days have long gone I'm afraid.

Agreed that there is possibly money to be made but a lot of people have had some very frustrating experiences with stock / micro stock sites and the general consensus seems to be it's more hassle than it's worth unless you're working at it almost full time and even then the returns are minimal these days. Micro stock / stock photography is more a game of image quality / image size / DPI etc instead of actual content / artistic merit etc which kinda spoils it for some people, photography (for me) is an expression / interpretation / personal thing, not a business opportunity. I will never earn as much from my photography as I do in my day job and I'd rather it stays that way, that way I'll enjoy it more!

Regards

Carl

[shank_ali]

Carl your taking about RM( rights managed).RF Microstock was introduced to the world by Bruce Livingston in 2002.He formed the company Istockphoto which was bought by Getty.However the company still has it's main HQ in Calgery and has a thriving community of both pro's and amateurs.
Photgraphy is indeed a passion for most and an actual job for some,but we can ALL earn some money from the pleasure.

[cosmicma]

to make money from stock photo sites you literally have to upload thousands of images to achieve anything like a steady income
it's a numbers game the more you upload and have accepted the more chance of somebody buying one of your images

i had a dabble with fotolia a while back and uploaded about 30 images for the fun of it amazingly out of the 30 images 4 sold and gave me the grand sum of just over a quid i came to the conclusion then it's a numbers game

so if i uploaded 3000 photos and the same percentage rate sold i would have made something like a 100 quid or so but this is not a monthly income it total to date
like others have allready stated it not worth my time or effort for the return

how many have you uploaded to get a monthly income ??