Let's take a look a Shutterstock, one of the more widely known web-based agencies.
Shutterstock is an on-line supplier of royalty free graphics with a slightly different sales method to most other such agencies.
When someone wants to buy royalty free images from them, instead of charging for each image downloaded, they require their customers to purchase a subscription. They basically have two types of subscription,
25 a day subscription
on-demand subscrition
For $120 per month or $370 for three months, you can download up to 25 hi-res images a day.
Check these prices yourself, as they obviously vary due to currency fluctuations.
They have a database of over 6,000,000 royalty free images which they claim is increasing at around 75,000 every week from 149,000 photographers.
If you upload your photographs and someone buys them, you are paid $0.25 per download.
If you refer another photographer who then uploads some photographs and begins to sell them, he will get the $0.25 per download, and you will earn $0.03 on each one.
If you refer someone who purchases a subscription you get 25% of the subscription. You also make the $0.25 on each of their downloads from your stock.
Shutterstock have recently introduced a video service from which you can gain referal fees of 10% of the sales value. However, I am not sure whether this is such a good deal because my understanding is that you are only paid on clips that are sold by someone you have introduced as a video supplier. In other words, if you were to become a video clip supplier through a friend's referral link he would be paid 10% every time you sold a clip. But, if he were to send traffic to the site as prospective buyers, he would not receive his 10% on anything they bought unless some of it was your stock.
As far as making money from Shutterstock is concerned, the magic word is 'volume'. In order to get the $0.25 per download up to worthwhile levels you will need lots of good quality images in high-selling categories. The site clearly works or 150,000 people would not have bothered to upload over 6,000,000 photographs. This only works out at an average of 40 per photographer, but given that most similar sites tend to gain most of their revenue from the top 20% or so of their members it is likely that around 4,500,000 of those photographs will have been provided by maybe 30,000 members. Even this averages only 150 each but it's the sort of volume you should be aiming to build up to initialy.
Browse through their stock to get an idea of the sort of images they sell, the categories they use to group them and the quality and image sizes they favour. Set up an account and begin uploading images in categories you feel comfortable shooting for. Uploading a dozen random images and waiting for the money to roll in is unlikely to make you rich, so keep shooting and uploading regularly whilst browsing the site to get an idea of what is selling at the moment.
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