Selling images online: Start your home photo business and make money from your digital camera

Online microstock photo agencies allow anyone from the amateur to the professional photographer to sell images easily. If photography is your hobby, it can provide an additional source of revenue for you. If you are a professional photographer, you can make some extra money by selling images online. Microstock sites could be an ideal place for photographers who like to share their work on public photo sites. But instead of getting a few new comments or ratings each day, they could get some more dollars in their account :)

Advantages of selling images on microstock sites:

1. You can earn some extra money selling your photos or illustrations, and if you are serious enough, you can even make it your primary source of income.
2. You can become a better photographer and improve your skills, both in photography and image editing.
3. One image can be sold many times, which means that you can end up making as much from many small sales as you would from a few large sales on a traditional stock photography site.
4. Microstock sites are friendly to amateur photographers, so even if you do not consider yourself a pro (yet :) you can still start your home photo business and eventually get to the professional level of selling photographs. The important thing is not how much you know in the beginning, but how much you are able to learn.

Disadvantages of selling images on microstock sites:

1. Low payout. For selling a royalty-free photo you can get as little as 20 cents. Some sites will pay you only 20% commission of the sales price, others are more generous and will pay 50%, and the maximum that you can get is about 70% commission for the photo sale.
2. Time consuming. Image editing, keywording and uploading do take lots of time. And to succeed you will need to upload as many images as you can, most often to several stock photo agencies at once.
3. Critics coming from some photographers: "Ah... those penny sites..." Yes, microstock sites are often criticized for devaluing the practice of photography, since they feature mostly pictures taken by non-professional photographers.

Future of microstock industry

No one really knows what will happen to microstock sites in the coming years. My personal opinion is that this market will continue to grow for at least a few years but it will be split because of many new agencies that will appear. Some years ago the only microstock site was iStockPhoto, and now there are at least 20 of them all over the world. Traditional stock photo agencies get interested by microstock too: Getty Images acquired iStockPhoto in February 2006; StockXpert is a subsidiary of Jupiter Images; Corbis has opened its own microstock site SnapVillage in June 2007, so most probably microstock industry will continue to grow in the next few years.