istockphoto.com is a joke. They sell photos from $1-$3, and they give you a 20% cut per sale ($0.10-$0.30). All of their photos are sold as royalty free, which means that the client pays a one-time fee for a photo, and they get to use it forever, however. It sounds great if you're a buyer, and you don't mind getting something that may not be unique. But as a photographer with the intent of making money, well, that's another story.

Photographer gets $0.10-$0.30 per sale. Let's assume that photographers get $0.30 per sale for the rest of this post. If you look at istockphoto's top sellers, they can sell a single photo maybe a few hundred times over the course of a year. Maybe even a thousand times.

The photographer's takes home $300 for every thousand sales. Okay, $300 per photo per year doesn't sound too bad for photos you have sitting dormant in your hard drive. But these photos are rare. Take a look at those top selling photographs again--they are usually of the "business lifestyle" variety, which are very marketable in the stock marketplace. They are even more marketable with model releases (which are a required part of submitting to istockphoto). Some of the contributors go through much time and trouble to produce those shots, involving multiple models, warddrobes, lighting, props, and locations. Is that really worth $0.30 a sale? or $300 a year? Keep in mind that most of these photos are lucky to sell 100 times in a year (or $30 for the photographer). Really not worth the trouble, in my opinion.

What these istock photographers don't realize is that they can make much more money going through a more traditional agency, such as agefotostock, alamy, mira, workbookstock, masterfile, luckypix, zefa... Lifestyle photography is in high demand, and these same photos that make $30 for the photographer can probably 5-10 times that amount at a 'real' agency. Their producing professional quality work involving professional level production and selling their photos for slave wages. Kind of like outsourcing IT jobs to India, but much, much sadder in the istockphoto case.

Now, I think istockphoto does have a niche in this marketplace. It's great for those photographers with a point and shoot camera who want to try and sell cute photos of their kids and pets, and it's great for those customers who don't have a budget for photography (non-profit newsletters, student projects, etc). But professional quality work should not be sold for less than the price of lunch.

One last note...if you submit to istockphoto, you have no control over how the buyer uses that image of yours. It can be used totally out of context, and you won't be able to do a thing. Imagine a photo of your spouse being used for an anti-prostitution campaign...

timdavis

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