Selling images online?

[Fireball]

Anyone have experience in using a site for selling your images and if so, do you earn much by doing it? What sites do you recommend?

[Cajungaltx]

Charrie,
I'm not sure what kind of site your talking about. I looked at your site - and it isn't a functional website - meaning it's showing your photos - it's what I call a 'bounce' site... meaning it's job is to bounce me to some other site that I don't want to go to.

It's annoying. I mean this in the nicest, most kindest manner you could ever be told something. Highly annoying. If I click on the link in your signature - my goal is to go look at 'your' work... not go to your website and get bumped around to different 'revenue' generating links.

Get a blog - put up some images, and redirect your site to your work... that's like the easiest possible thing to do.

Most people will buy a template from one of the sites - I recommend portfoliositez.com - you can check mine out at the bottom of the post - but others are bludomain.com (customer service complaints abound with them, so do your research)... I'm sure others will have suggestions as well.

If your looking at doing a website to show case your work - then yes, most of us have experience doing that. Profit margins vary because of the price structure you provide... and the images.

Unless you are meaning stock photography? I seem to remember someone posted a $150 check they received on one of their images recently...

Stock photography seems to be a 'hit' and 'miss' kind of thing. Brad posted some images a while back of images that were 'declined' by some stock photography company that - holy freaking cow - were gorgeous. Whoever declined them, were obviously idiots.

Seriously.

[kayumangi]

Donna, I think Charrie is looking for a stock photography site.

Charrie, at work we buy from sxc.hu, GettyImages.com and iStockPhoto.com; But from a selling stand point I tried it once through iStockPhoto but only ended up with a couple of cents profit. If you have a Flickr account I think they are tied to Getty, I just don't know exactly how.

You really need to submit a lot of photos and hope that some of them get accepted. in fact pictures of your babies, children or pets are the first ones to be rejected, no matter how awesome you shot them.

Like Donna said you can submit quality images but if a lot of photographers offer that type of image already, it would be a hard sell.

In fact, talking from our image buying habits, we tend to buy images that are typical if not flat out boring =)

[Fireball]

Okay, I'm not quite getting at what you're saying. My link goes to my blog, a place where I post my latest work and make personal comments on it. The only place it would "bump" you to is My Photo Galleries link on the right side which takes you to my smugmug gallery page for purchasing photos.

I was talking about stock photography, I guess. I'm wanting to try and have someone else sell my images while I make some money off of them. Thanks for helping.

[Cajungaltx]

Originally Posted by Fireball

Okay, I'm not quite getting at what you're saying. My link goes to my blog, a place where I post my latest work and make personal comments on it. The only place it would "bump" you to is My Photo Galleries link on the right side which takes you to my smugmug gallery page for purchasing photos.

I was talking about stock photography, I guess. I'm wanting to try and have someone else sell my images while I make some money off of them. Thanks for helping.

Awesome! I wasn't sure what you were asking for after I clicked the link previously. Did you just change it?

Actually - it looks like you did cause the link in your signature is going to your blog now. The link previously sent me to this:
http://www.cshockeyphotography.com/

Glad it's fixed.

[Fireball]

Yes, that was my custom domain name through blogger that was messed up about a month ago or so and no one can seem to help me get it fixed (UGH, Blogger!) so I had to go back to my blogspot one instead. Glad to know it's working at least.

I still didn't get any feedback about selling my images. Any sites you would recommend?

[Cajungaltx]

Marius listed 3 or 4 in his post above. I don't do stock photography.

Cajungaltx added 11 Minutes and 12 Seconds later...Double Post Merged Below

Originally Posted by Fireball

Yes, that was my custom domain name through blogger that was messed up about a month ago or so and no one can seem to help me get it fixed (UGH, Blogger!) so I had to go back to my blogspot one instead. Glad to know it's working at least.

I still didn't get any feedback about selling my images. Any sites you would recommend?

Did you buy the http://www.cshockeyphotography.com through blogger?

[bondarnes]

I sold a few stock images before the internet when the money was still pretty good. With the internet sites and millions of images on each one, unless you are heavily into stock sales you will only be making pennies per sale. It's not uncommon for beginners to only make a couple of bucks per year. YMMV

[jeffkohn]

I still didn't get any feedback about selling my images. Any sites you would recommend?

I honestly question whether it's worth the time and trouble. The stock images market has been destroyed by the vast quantities of dirt-cheap and free images available. There's just no money in stock anymore unless you can fill a niche for which there's demand but limited supply. If you do have such a library you would probably be better off marketing the images yourself rather than using one of the general microstock sites such as istockphoto.com, shutterstock.com, etc. If you really want to try some of these sites just google "micro stock sites" and you should find plenty of information. For instance here. Alamy used to be a good alternative to micro-stock for quality images, but from what I've heard even they are so flooded with images that making any significant money is extremely difficult.

[Fireball]

Originally Posted by Cajungaltx

Marius listed 3 or 4 in his post above. I don't do stock photography.

Cajungaltx added 11 Minutes and 12 Seconds later...Double Post Merged Below



Did you buy the http://www.cshockeyphotography.com through blogger?

Yes, I did, about a year ago. And then a few months ago it went to that ad site you saw and there's no "real" person to call or contact. Everything for blogger is through their help forum. I've been round and round trying everything under the sun to get it back but alot of it is computer jargon I just can't seem to comprehend. It happened to alot of people with alot of angry customers!

I figure I'll just keep the blogspot until I take the steps to get my own website someday.

Fireball added 1 Minutes and 22 Seconds later...Double Post Merged Below

Originally Posted by bondarnes

I sold a few stock images before the internet when the money was still pretty good. With the internet sites and millions of images on each one, unless you are heavily into stock sales you will only be making pennies per sale. It's not uncommon for beginners to only make a couple of bucks per year. YMMV

Yep, that's what I'm gathering as I've researched the internet. I noticed istockphotos.com only pays you 20% per download. Hmmm...seems somebody is making money!

[Cajungaltx]

Blogger is partnered with either godaddy or eNom - so that's where your domain name is registered at.

You should have received an email when you purchased the domain - which should have the info in it about who has your domain. If not, I'd contact both godaddy or eNom and see which has it. The domain cost you $10/year, so it needs to be working for you!

[alamoshutterbug]

I submit to Alamy from time to time. I have 400 images up since 10/08, 1 sale, $50 commission. I stopped submitting after January this year because things looked bad over there. Then I had a sale, things picked up search wise, and I decided to throw some of my recent travel pics up there. Honestly, it is not worth the time when you are starting up, but over time it could do different things. It could take you out to eat once a month, week... Make your car payment from time to time. Only problem is, as mentioned above, the industry is in a tumult and there is no telling where things will be in a year, or just a few months even. I tread lightly with it and treat it more as a hobby. I don't spend much time tweaking over my keywording and try to keep it efficient and effective. I spend time on it knowing that it may all be for naught when the hatchet falls; therefore I do not throw myself at it.

Some observations about alamy:

The image turnover is not as great at Alamy and you don't have to continually submit to keep up top on the search results. Searches often pull up rather dated images that still rank well for some reason. In that regard it's a bit more passive than the micros, if you want it to be.

The average sale these days seems to be around 50-150. Bear in mind however that Alamy recently caved to the UK newspapers and is now offering them a subscription service at near micro prices (you can opt out of this) Some sales reported at their forum are horrendously low. Some sales are much better, but they are few and far between. BTW, Getty does the same thing with subscriptions; unless you're in one of the better collections at Getty, sales are bad there too.

Alamy is chock full of other collections and dealers. This means some other collections come in and dump their whole library on Alamy. It's hard to rank well against collections of 20k, 30k + images. It can be done, but you have to find a niche.

Just the same the really successful Alamy shooters have libraries in the five figures in size (Jeff Greenberg's stands at 63,000 today).

Things seem to pick up for others once they hit the 1-2k images level. (That is ALOT of work!!!)

You face much less competition shooting in Texas and posting on Alamy than you do shooting in the UK, or most of Europe for that matter, which is nice. Buyers seem to shop Texas a fair bit these days (just nibbles for me though, no bites just yet).

There are some niche agencies that you can do rather well with depending on what you're shooting. There is one agency, the name escapes me, that supplies much of the artsy, kinda dark imagery you see so often on contemporary fiction titles in bookstores. You can always look inside the book for credits to see which agencies are dealing with what type of material.

Check out Alamy's forum and read the sales threads, it's informative.

[Fireball]

Originally Posted by Cajungaltx

Blogger is partnered with either godaddy or eNom - so that's where your domain name is registered at.

You should have received an email when you purchased the domain - which should have the info in it about who has your domain. If not, I'd contact both godaddy or eNom and see which has it. The domain cost you $10/year, so it needs to be working for you!

I bought my custom domain through blogger of which they're a reseller for eNom so they direct me right back to the blogger help forum again! I think all of it has something to do with DNS settings which no one can seem to help me figure out how to change that. When you ask a question on the help forum, you might get one response before it gets lost in hundreds of other questions and the response is so vague or technical, that I still don't know what to do. Believe me, I've been trying for months now and have just given up.

I tried setting up a different one in Wordpress but find blogger's format much easier to configure since I can go in and change HTML settings, etc.

[jgrindal]

iStockPhoto and Getty Images are where I sell some of mine. Like Don said, it's very hit or miss, and the dollars are in the volume. The more images you have up, the more chance that you'll have of selling something.

I had one image of a pumpjack that was posted on getty for a long time with no sales, then one day someone decided they would use it for a big print run or some such, becuase I got a $600 check for their use of it. Nifty.

Anyway, I would start with the microstock sites, iStock, ShutterStock, BigStock, etc. My advice is don't expect to sell ANYTHING, then when you do, it's like a bonus.

[suzyjazz]

I sold 1 image through acclaimimages.com and made $180. I don't recommend them, though. Things got weird there and I bailed years ago. To give you an idea of how bad they are with the photographer side of things (can't speak to the customer side), my name is STILL listed on the photographer page, and the image next to my name is broken (because I took my business web site down).