Selling Your Photos as “Stock” Online

Selling photos to a stock agency is a dream of many photographers (pros included), but generally only the best of the best get this opportunity. Until now. Now you can start selling royalty-free stock photography today thanks to iStockphoto.com, which is a community of photographers all around the world who sell their photos online as stock (which means you give the rights to other people to buy, download, and use your photos in brochures, ads, websites, flyers, and other collateral material graphic designers and Web designers create for their clients). The great thing is anybody that follows their guidelines can upload their own photos and start selling them right away as part of iStockphoto’s huge database of images. Now, you only get paid on how many people actually buy your photo, and since the photos sell for $1 (for extra small size), $3 (for small size), $6 (for medium size), $12 (for large size), and $18–27 (for full-page), you’re going to need to move a lot of photos to make this a business. But let me tell you this, there are photographers who make their living (and their Porsche payments) strictly from what they sell on iStockphoto.com, because iStockphoto is used by about a bazillion people around the world. Needless to say, the better quality your work is, and the more popular the subjects are, the more your images will get downloaded. How popular is iStockphoto.com? Well, Getty Images, one of the world’s leading and most respected providers of high-quality stock images, bought them out—if that gives you any idea.