[nofarrell]

October 21, 2007 at 1:32 pm

I have to agree the it is difficult for a photographer to make a living selling there images to some Royalty free stock agencies especially if they only receive 20% to 30% commission and the image is sold of $1 or 5$. More disgracefully is the fact that some of these stock agencies also charge its photographer members a membership fee, or disk space fee. IF you want to make money from selling stock photos you really need to be aiming for the Rights Managed Stock Photo Market. The Royalty Free Stock market is a great starting place for amateur photographers, but you must also chose your stock agencies carefully because you don?t want to find that the membership costs are greater than your profit. So for amateur photographers I suggest looking for agencies that offers free membership.

I am the founder of an Irish Stock Photo agency, so I know the difficulties and expenses of this type of a business. For any such agencies like this starting off in this competitive market you are forced to keep you pricing structure similar to that of the micropayment photographic libraries otherwise you can not compete in this market. So for anyone trying to start this type this type of business it not easy, the costs are high and until you can established a market share you will make no profits. One of the aims of the so called micropayment photographic libraries group is to keep the price down so low that they can prevent new competitor from taking there market share, due to this many new agencies never survive there first year in this type of market. But as a photographer what annoys me more is that at the end of the day it?s the photographer who is suffering trying to make a living because who can make a living if they get 30% of the profit from a picture sold for $1 especial it you compare the euro to dollar exchange rates.

My recommendation to everyone who wishes to make money from selling photos through stock agencies is to build up a good portfolio of images. Your best high quality images should be sold through Rights Managed Agencies, but if you find that some of these images continuously fail to sell then try then in the royalty free market. For your images that are not the high quality for the Rights Manages markets you should sell through the Royalty free market. To make a lot of money in the Royalty free stock market you need to have a large number of images at least 1000 uploaded to different agencies.

Why do some picture sell easily on a stock agencies and other do not?
If you are hungry and you go out for a meal, you normally decide the tonight you might like Italian, Thai or Chinese. So based on your decision you will head to a that type of a restaurant and more than likely you also probably have a certain dish in mind that you would like to eat when you arrive so there is no need for you to spend time on the menu, you simply ask the waiter for the dish you want. Apply this same theory to a Photo Buyer going to a stock agencies, the buyer want an image, he know what he is looking for and that?s the only type of image he will look for. So simply your image have to wait of the right buyer to come along before they are sold.