Topic how much can I earn from microstock?

By Steve Gibson
Written 19 April 2008
Revised 25 February 2010

istockphoto pay out around $1.6million (USD) per week to their contributors (Feb 2010), so clearly someone is making money at this, but the question has a similar answer to "How long is a piece of string?". How hard you work, how good your photos and keywords are, subjects and style will all have a significant impact on how well your images sell. Artists who spend long hours creating detailed illustrations and vector drawings could earn a similar amount to a photographer with a portfolio only a tenth the size.

Calculations

The things to remember with microstock are that:

You earn even when you are on holiday or take a month off (but do it too often and your income will start to fall ever so gradually away) this flexibility benefit is a major driver for people to work in microstock full time.
Earning 50 dollars a month on one microstock site might not sound a lot for all those hours, but upload those images to all the top 10 agencies and that figure can become 250+ (note that the value is not 10X, as the smaller agencies sell a lot less).
Income is directly proportional to your efforts, flexibility, and how well you see the market needs, keep yourself informed and up to date with microstock news.
You enjoy taking photos, if you don't, then go and do something else you find more fulfilling.

Revenue Per Image Per Year

I read recently that macrostock photographers might expect $5 per year income from each image (ozimages.com.au a rights managed collection) others suggest $1 per image per year is a good rule of thumb for the traditional agencies and average income for the photographer being $1.82 (ref on istock forums). For microstock another photographer quotes income as $14 for just istockphoto (reference), the value is about $9 for lee at microstockdiaries and much more modest $3.50 per image per year for myself. The 2008 survey at microstockgroup put the figure at $8.71 per image. You can see by the above that the average income figure swings wildly and is of course very dependant on the quality of your images, the chosen subjects and the keywords you apply to them. The difference between 3 and 9 dollars might not sound much but it's can mean a pay cut of $6000 pa. on a portfolio of 1000 images.

It's near impossible for me to give you any accurate insight into how much you as an individual can earn, I can only tell you my experience, and as a rough estimate you can expect to bring in 30-100 USD per month, per 100 images you have had accepted on the top 6 microstock sites. More difficult for me to measure is how much time I have spent uploading images to these sites to analyse my ROI. A dollar an image a month if you are lucky might not sound a lot, but it's cumulative, they keep on earning, upload another 100 and double it.

Look at an Independent View

As I often find myself writing, one of the nice things about the microstock photographer community is the willingness to share sales figures (that willingness often reduces as photographers move from serious amateur into "microstock pro") there are lots of microstock bloggers out there willing to share their sales stats in monthy graphs.

In early 2010 lookstat (review link) created a microstock guide for RM and macro RF photographers writing:

"On average contributors see $12-15 annual revenue per image (RPI). Also, select and approval rates are typically far higher than those of RM and RF agencies, so your cost per select is lower."

Lookstat.com are a microstock photographer service who are able to aggregate sales stats for a wide range of microstock contributors.

There are several other places to look at microstock stats istockcharts is a useful site but you can only use it to guestimate earnings, it's also easy to misinterpret. Above all it shows you the massive range of earnings, portfolio sizes and numbers of downloads per image across istocks community.