Start your home photo business

Online microstock photo agencies allow anyone from the amateur to 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 or even make a living on it. 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 make it your primary source of income and make a living on it.
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. The important thing is not how much you know in the beginning, but how much you are able and willing 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 60% 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 are open to non-professional photographers.

Future of microstock industry

Most probably the microstock market will continue to grow for at least a few years, and consolidation will happen. Ten years ago the only microstock site was iStockPhoto, 3 years ago there were 20 of them all over the world, and the market became split. Many of smaller sites have not survived the competition, and those who did were bought by bigger agencies. Traditional stock photo agencies got interested in microstock: Getty Images acquired iStockPhoto in February 2006; Stockxpert.com became a subsidiary of Jupiter Images but later was sold to Getty and eventually shut down. Corbis has opened its own microstock site SnapVillage in June 2007 but did’t have success and replaced it by Veer Marchetplace. Shutterstock has acquired BigStockPhoto in 2009.