Hi, everyone and welcome to my money making series! Today we are going to take a closer look at stock photography. I will lay my profound statement of truth in this article to debunk the popular online myths about how easy and fast you can become rich selling the stock photos you randomly collected on your computer or deliberately taking while travelling in order to sell it online.
I've been making some very insignificant money on stock photography for some time so I decided to unravel the misconceptions about "getting rich quick scheme" surrounding this earning niche.
And I am a member of about ten different stock sites.
So we've got Shutterstock, we've got Adobe Stock, we've got Getty, which is mainly istock (for me). And another one that's a little bit more unusual is we've got Creative Market.Take in mind I don't usually use Creative Market for actually making money. I primarily use it as credit so that I can download other resources without having to pay for them.And finally, we've got Wire Stock and Wire Stock is the one that I've focused on in recent times.The reason for that is that it's a lot quicker to upload and then your images get distributed through multiple channels, as Shutterstock, Adobe, Instant Pay, Alamy, Pond5, Depositphotos, Getty/IStock and a whole bunch of other spaces as well.
So I've done some calculations for you so that you can work out whether this is worth your while as a source of income. Now, I've calculated that the average sale in US dollars is around $0.75. In Australian, it's $1.04. I've got about 2000 photographs on wire stock and I've calculated that per week I make about six sales for about $12 Australian a week or $10 US. So to make the minimum wage in the US would take 71 weeks in sales for me to make one week of that US minimum wage. And for Australia it would take me 138 weeks because the minimum wage in Australia is higher. However, one thing is for sure: we don't want to be making minimum wage, do we?
What's the minimum wage? Minimum wage is a better indicator because it's not as shifted by all of the people making really big money. So for the US you're looking at 87,000 annually and for Australia, 95,000.
Let's calculate how many images we need to have in this library to actually make a decent amount of money. If we wanted to make 300 US week, we would need a library of 75,000 images selling at the same rate that I just mentioned above. For the Australian minimum wage, we would need 140,000 images. Wow, what a vast amount!
Now for the minimum wage that is 87,000 US a year. It's going to take a library of 333,500. And if you want to try and make the minimum wage in Australia, you need an image library of 232,384 images. At the current rate that I'm making money out of stock out of my 2000 images. It's going to take me 322 years to make one year of US minimim wage and 243 years to make the Australian equivalent.
By the time I make any meaningful money out of this, the whole industry is going to be wiped out by AI anyway.
I'm not going to tell you not to bother with stock at all, but I think it's really important to be realistic. Those people that have made money out of stock, they have massive image libraries that they've created over many, many, many years. And they probably got into this back in the earlier days when you could make a lot of money out of this. But as a strategy for 2024 and the years ahead, it's just not there anymore. And what I find it even a little bit insulting is that they can pay you different commission rates depending on how many images you've sold in the year. Presumably this is their reward you for your loyalty and for making a lot of sales on their platform. It is offensive, indeed.However, it seems that as soon as the year ticks over, they kick you back to the first commission, right? Regardless of what you've done for them in the past. And personally, I think that's kind of wrong.
There are so many better ways to make money in photography than stock,and maybe we'll talk about them in some of the next articles that are part of the money making series here on Rainbow FunLiving.
Аз съм Роси. Това е моят блог за грим, мода, козметика.
