About two years ago, I discovered Shutterbox. It’s suppose to sell your photos for you at $0.20 per download and the idea is great. However, my photos then weren’t at par with the quality they want.
I thought only a few people could pass their standards and one can’t make enough money off of a $0.20 download. I guess I was wrong — check out Lise Gagne and her collection from iStockPhoto, another online photo marketplace.
Her collection has already surpassed 500,000 downloads — yup, half a million sold photos since she started back in 2003. That’s from a collection of just 5,002 photos — wow, as in wow. If problogging is getting its groove, I’m sure prophotoblogging (that’s a mouthful) should be the next best thing.
Ok, so let’s just say she gets $0.20 for each paid download, the same rates as Shutterbox so we’re a little conservative there. We multiply 512,669 and $0.20 and we get $102,533.8 in total. However, I’m sure she’s getting way more than $0.20 per download. Make it $2 and she takes home a million big bucks.
Time to get back and sort that photo archive.
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Not just sort, but also photoshop…
Some of the photos I saw in Lise’s site look photoshopped. If that’s the case, then those half a million downloads is proof of this marketing principle:
“Make it easy for your customers.”
I have a portfolio at istockphoto: http://www.istockphoto.com/jeffreyw - most of them are illustrations or vectors.
I’ve earned 800 dollars in 3 years, it’s getting slower now, maybe because of internal competition good artists/photographers growing and proliferation of similar photo sites.
Shutterbox just dumped my ten photos the other day! Sniff! Sniff!
The lisegagne site is very impressive. But you would need a very large investment of money and time (and a bit of luck) to achieve something similar.
I am also trying to make money from photos online, but approaching it from a different angle, by making my images freely available, and mainly using adsense to monetise my web site.
I have started a Make Money From Photos Online Blog if anyone wants to follow my progress!
That’s a lot of money….