8. Which sites should I join ?
At last !! After 6 pages of introduction explaining the how, what, when, where and why of micro's, we are ready to join this circus.
The first choice we must make is at which sites we will submit.
Of course we could submit to all sites we can find on the net, but this would be time consuming. Some sites are fairly new and are imho not really worth submitting to, at least for the moment.
Even worse, at some sites you'll never make your minimum payout amount which means that you'll never be paid -> aka : you've given your images away for free.
8.1. Comparison by earnings
We could compare a lot of features of those sites, but eventually it all comes down to how $$$ much you can make on a certain site. Even if the royalties are not so high, the check on the end of the month is what counts.
In order to know which sites to join, I've compared the earnings of 13 photographers, including me, who contributed to several sites. The figures are shown below.
Legend and some comments
** In the first column under "me" you see my earnings across the different sites in %. Shutterstock is clearly my biggest earner despite the low royalty of $0.30 a download.
I put questions mark behind StcokXpert because I did subscribe only a week ago. Thus no figure for StockXpert from me yet.
** In the second column under "Avg" you see the average earnings in % of all contributors I compared. You see that they match my personal percentages fairly well.
This column also shows which sites are the best to submit. Almost 95% of the income is made from what we call the "big 6". Amongst these 6, shutterstock and iStock are clearly the best sites. BigStockPhoto seems to be the least attractive.
Because of this table, it was clear to me that I problably miss some meaningful income because I wasn't submitting to StockXpert. Most report earnings approximately the same as Dreamstime of Fotolia. This was enough for me to sign up at StockXpert too :o)
** The next two rows "Low" and "High" gives the minimum and maximum % of the individual photographers. For shutterstock this means that someone only made 20% of his total earnings from shutterstock while someone else got 71% of his check from shutterstock.
** Under the "Number" column, the number of photographers contributing to a particular site is shown. Remarkable that almost all are submitting to the first five sites. While a few clearly missed StockXpert ;o)
8.2. New Sites
I'm not so interested in new sites. But lately 2 sites were launched which are worth mentioning and and maybe even following.
The first is Albumo who pays at the moment per submitted photo. This gives some confidence with a lot of photographers, but I'm not so sure right now. I'll just wait and see how it goes.
Secondly there is Snapvillage which is own by Corbis. The name Corbis does ring a bell by most and therefor Snapvillage got some credits. But again I just wait and see what happens.
8.3. Comparison by Alexa Ranking
Another way to see which sites you should join is to look at the traffic of these sites. The more traffic, chances are the more buyers there are.
On the first chart you see a yearly graph of the pageviews of the four largest microstock site today.
The chart clearly shows that iStockphoto.com has the most pageviews of all, no doubt about it.
In the second chart we replaced iStock by StockXpert. Now the graph is more in proportion.
Shutterstock seems to have the second most pageviews, followed by Fotolia who had a significant jump late June after they introduced version 2 of their site. Dreamstime and StockXpert are closing the line here.
The third chart shows StockXpert together with the smallest of the big 6 : BigStockPhoto. The graph also shows the two new stocksites Albumo and Snapvillage. You can see they still have a long way to go.
Because the javascript of Alexa.com isn't working for me I had to take screenshots. If you're more interested in the traffic of any site, I suggest you visit Alexa.com
You can view the up-to-date version of the graphics above on their site by clicking on the following links :
Graph 1,
Graph 2,
Graph 3
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