Can you make money from stock photography? Well the answer is definitely yes. If no one was making money then the industry wouldn’t exist.
My brother certainly makes money from it. His best selling image is of a location that’s pretty difficult to get to so there aren’t a huge number of images available.
So, can I make money from it? I’m thinking that it’s exceptionally unlikely. A graph of people making money feels as though it’s be incredibly long tail in nature.
Alamy, for example, has 54,297,692 images. If you’re after an image that’s great, but if you’re looking to sell one. Not so much.
Pick a really generic search term such as “apple” and you get 230,158 results. Even something which feels like it’d not have many results such as “Bulgarian windmill” returns 77. All of this makes me wonder whether than can ever be a category of photo that isn’t completely overdone all ready.
It seems it’s too much of a buyers market to bother investing any time in.
What do you think? Do any of you make any money from stock photography? How many images did you upload? How many sales do you get? How much do you think you’re earning per hour of work?
[figures were correct as of 23rd Jan 2014]
I always had it in my mind that I could making money from Stoke Photography but as you say there are miliions of photographs of say a church or Robin. I have not invested in any time looking at stock photography yet, I am to busy taking photographs.
Si
Just Stoke or other cities too?
Rlol the "R" key is not working that well.
Si
It’s not an easy business that’s for sure . But why quit? Check out stock photos at marketplace.sketchfam.com/sketchfamphotos