Micro royalty free stock photography sites such as Shutterstock, Dreamstime, Fotolia, 123rf gives a good chance for designers to get cheap, high quality images of any theme.
Micro-payment stock license fees are very attractive to stock photo buyers, and photographers literally can make more, than selling photos on regular royalty-free stock photo sites, and web designers, illustrators can buy images and illustrations for very low prices. Each site even has a free images section, where photographers donate some photos for free.
Photographers can earn money by selling stock photos.
- This is the leading micro stock agency today. Shutterstock’s business model allows a customer to make a subscription and during the subscription period the customer can download 25 pictures a day. This model encourages downloads, and indeed you will get allot of downloads. The photographers earn 25c per download, and additional 5c if the customer also requested to burn the image on a CD. There are also broader uses licenses that the client can buy for additional payment. The site is very friendly. It has an FTP upload option and pictures are approved within a day or two.
Current stats: 13,937,022 photos available for download
- This is a less known site, but still very popular with the clients, and gets great sells. The basic price per image is 1$ (or 2$ for full resolution) out of which the photographer gets 50%.
The site is very friendly. It has an FTP upload option and pictures are usually approved within a three days.
Current stats: 9,867,916 photos available for download
(Dreamstime also has the largest library of free images, donated from fhotographers!)
- Fotolia is a rising star in the field of stock photography. They usually pay more then 50% of the commission to the photographer, and allow you to set your own price. They are one of the fastest to approve photographs. Another nice thing is the way you can get your money. They will allow you to make a paypal cashout once you’ve hit the 2 dollar mark.
Current stats: 9.476.265 photos available for download
- is a relatively new agency which is doing well. They are still small, so if you are good standing out is easy. They pay 50% of each sale to the photographer – nice. Another nice feature is email notification once your images has been approved or rejected.
Current stats: ~ 8.536.097 photos available for download
