There is a lot of bad advice online on how to make money as a photographer. Truth be told, I followed much of it and made a big fat zero. This is not because such advice is wrong, but rather because it is out of touch with what the market is in 2024. In this article, I will shed light on one of the worst ways to make money with your work.
Perhaps one of the most popular pieces of advice when it comes to making money that I keep hearing is, of course, stock photography. This is a genre that has been popularized by some people on YouTube, and as a result, there are a number of photographers wasting time trying to sell their images online. Usually, it doesn’t work, and they are left wondering why their great work is not making them passive income. A baffling predicament to find oneself in, indeed. The truth is, stock photography, no matter the genre or level, is a niche that doesn’t have that much money in it anymore.
Classic Stock Photography Sells Images Cheaply
Living in the age of social media, every brand, no matter how big or small, always needs content for their marketing purposes. Images, video, and everything in between. This is great for photographers as it means that there is now more work than ever. With that in mind, the business-savvy creators will think the following: Why not shoot a ton of generic images and license them out to companies that need content fast and don’t want to spend tons of money on hiring a photographer? The brand will use the image for a period of time, you will get your money, and life is good. Sounds like a viable business model. Except that it isn’t.
Stock photography sites pay anywhere from a few cents to a few dozen dollars per image depending on usage rights, client, and content. And they have clients; we at Fstoppers have bought stock images for our articles in the past. This is a very common practice in many institutions worldwide. The demand for stock photos is there.
If the demand is there, why can’t you make a profit on doing stock photography alone? Well, because the supply is astronomically high. Anyone can register on a stock photography website and go on to make money with it. I uploaded a ton of images to a few stock websites back in the day, and having had them up for a number of years, I ended up with zero, zip, zilch, nada. Not because the work was bad, or that I didn’t use a ton of keywords and tags for it, simply because there is already so much of it on stock websites, nobody sees it anymore.
If you go look for stock images of a dog, you will find hundreds of thousands of images ready for you to license. Chances are, the first fifty search results will be more than enough to satisfy you, and you will end up buying one of these images. How does one get their work in the top 50? Well, they should’ve started uploading to stock websites at least a decade ago. If you are starting out now and want to try out stock photography, your work will automatically end up at the bottom. As far as I know, stock websites show images that have been sold before or were uploaded by profitable users. This makes perfect sense. As a business, a stock website wants to minimize the time the user spends searching for an image. If they need to scroll through thousands of new images which are bad, they will not buy something and go look elsewhere. It’s sort of like when Instagram shows you more popular posts first. Same with YouTube. Even if the content is great, but the user is new, their videos won’t be shown to you.
If you are planning, or already uploading to stock websites, I strongly suggest you put your efforts elsewhere as this is not a profitable path. The 1% of users on stock websites who pioneered stock photography back in the day are making a somewhat sustainable income. For the rest of us who were late to the party, we need to go elsewhere. Not because the opportunity is not there, but because nobody will see your work or buy it.
Licensing
A more bespoke way of doing stock photography is licensing. Say you shot a celebrity and a few magazines are looking to run that image as part of a story they will be doing. They can pay you in the hundreds to low thousands range. Typically not more than $500, though. This all depends on what sort of image it is. Of course, if you are a paparazzi and have captured a unique shot of Matt Damon kicking a pigeon, you might have luck selling it to Fox News for a lot more than that. Mind you, being a paparazzi is by far the least respected career path in photography. With licensing, however, you need to be aware that it’s yet again hard to get into. There are several syndication/licensing websites that handpick the roster of photographers they represent. Typically the work has to be commercially or editorially viable. I would not expect anyone with less than five years of experience being a full-time photographer and fewer than a dozen high-profile jobs to have such opportunities. Even then, syndication is not a very profitable way either. It is rare that companies that have the budget to license work will not just go ahead and schedule a production and pay a photographer.
In the end, it all comes down to my favorite advice: it is better to do two $500 jobs than ten $50 jobs. As such, you will have better clients, more fun on set, and be a lot more profitable by the end of it. You will also create images, which is arguably way more fun than just trying to sell existing work.
Over to you! What is your experience with stock photography? Have you made money selling your images online?
