Stock Photography of Different Kind

Tuesday, June 07, 2005

When browsing through photography websites sometime back, I clicked on an ad from shutterstock and discovered their website. They have an interesting model for selling pictures. It seems especially attractive to non-professional digital photographers who want to make some money out of what they shoot.

The business model goes like this - the buyers get it cheap, the seller sells cheap. Low prices could transform into many downloads. The seller and the stock agency make money in volumes. A buyer looking for photographs gets to download photos for as little as less than a dollar irrespective of how he is going to use it. The photographers can upload as many (digital) pictures as possible which adhere to some (not so tough) quality norms. Although some screening of quality is done, most of the pictures will be out up for sale; so you don’t have to have a big collection of really good stuff. The site claims to have more than 200,000 pictures and adding a few thousands every week.

I went through some of the photographer's forums on the websites and saw that they do claim to make decent money out of it. An observation seemed to be that more photos you upload to their site, more hits you are likely get from buyers and if your photos are decent enough, you can end up with decent money.

Though I am personally not inclined to it, sounds like a good starting for photographers who are still starting up and would like to make some money out of their expensive hobby.