The SitePoint Photography forum reveals that there are a number of very talented photographers hanging out around SitePoint. For many of you, photography is an amateur affair, strictly a hobby that you do in your spare time. But wouldn’t it be nice if you could take that library of beautiful photos and start drawing a passive income from them without having to put too much effort into it?

According to Forbes, amateur-produced stock photos have become a huge business on the web. Last year, one such site called iStockPhoto paid photographers a whopping $20.9 million in royalties. Surprisingly, though, even with thousands of people sharing photos on the web (and the ubiquity of cheap digital SLRs meaning that many of those photos are high quality), most people have no idea they can make money from their photos. iStockPhoto recently surveyed 1,000 people and just a quarter of them had even heard of stock photography.

And iStockPhoto is just one of many places you can upload your photos and start making money. Many of the sites below now host millions of photos from thousands of photographers, and have millions of paying customers.

• BigStockPhoto - Pays 50 cents to $3.00 per image download, and up to $60 per download for “Special Licensing” sales. Check out their list of photos they need to increase chances of making sales. Site adds about 2,000 photos per day.
• iStockPhoto - Pays 20-40% on prices ranging from $1 to $20 (for photos) — pays more if you offer them an exclusive on your work. Minimum of 19 cents per download on subscription downloads. Also sells videos, illustrations, flash, and audio. Over 3.5 million photos on site.
• Dreamstime - 3.6 million photos from 44,000 photographers. Dreamstime pays 35 cents to $8.40 per image, with more for exclusives, and additional payouts for special rights (such as print usage). Also does illustrations, and pays extra for sales of RAW and vector art.
• Shutterstock - 4.4 million images from 116,000 photographers. Sells on subscription and pays 25 cents per download. Also has a referral system — earn 3 cents per photo sold by photographers you refer. Does illustrations and now video as well.
• StockXpert - Pay site from the people behind the free stock.xchng stock photo sharing site. Pays 50% with prices at $1 to $10 per photo.
• 123 Royalty Free - Pays 50% and 36 cents per subscription download. Also has a referral program (10% per photo sold for referred photographers). 2.8 million photos. Photographers can offer some images for free to boost traffic to their portfolio.
• CanStockPhoto - 700,000 images from 6,500 photographers selling for $1 each. Contributors get 50% and 25 cents per subscription download.
• Fotolia - 4 million photos online selling from $1 to $3 each. Fotolia pays out between 33% and 64% of the sale price to photographers.
• Shutterpoint - Super high 70% or 85% payout rates (based on which royalty free license you sell under). Also seems to power Keen Images, which is more or less an identical system. Check out the What’s Selling page to see what sort of photos people like to buy.
• Photo Stock Plus - Pays an 85% commission minus a 3.25% processing fee, and photographers set their own pricing. Good deal, but less exposure than at other sites. Stats showing how views convert to sales are helpful for planning what to shoot next.
• CreStock - Pays a 30% commission on sales, with pricing at $5 to $15 per images. You first 100 sales are at 20% commission, however. Subscription downloads pay out at a 25 cents per sale flat fee. Check out the best images page, and peruse the worst images archive, as well. Both have very helpful comments about what makes the images good or bad.
• SnapVillage - Pricing from $1 to $50 per image (photographer’s choice) and a royalty rate of 30%. Pays 30 cents on subscription downloads.
• Nature Photo Index - Despite the name, not strictly for nature photos — they also have categories for “technology” and “architecture,” for example. A small site, with just a few thousand photos, but they claim to give 99% of the sale price back to photographers.
• Scoopt - For news and public interest photos, Scoopt lets you sell photos to newspapers and media outlets. The site says they negotiate with photo editors to get the best price possible, and pays photographers a 40% royalty. The hottest “scoops” go straight into the Getty Images catalog.
• Citizenside - Another site that also sells photos to the news media. Not much on how it works but commissions for photographers are “up to 75%.”
• Bonus: Flickr - Flickr isn’t really a place to sell digital photos, but via a partnership with Getty announced in July, some lucky Flickr photographers are getting their photos sourced into the Getty catalog. For now, it’s an invite only program for the site’s most talented users.

So now, the only thing left to do is figure out what to take pictures of. The All Things Photography site has some great advice for budding stock photographers that covers things like equipment, composition, subject matter, and legal issues.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 at 8:08 am, contains 874 words, 1 image, and is filed under News & Trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. The views and opinions in this blog post are those of its author.