Supplement Your Income by Submitting Stock Images to Adobe Stock, iStock and Alamy

Shutterstock has for a long time been the king of the microstock industry, continuing to be the biggest earner for the majority of image and footage contributors. Yet the time when Shutterstock may still be considered as the only reliable income provider for contributors is long gone.

In this article we will look at three alternative agencies that can provide complimentary income to your existing Shutterstock portfolio. By all means continue to upload to Shutterstock as normal, but keep in mind that depending on your field of expertise, these agencies may even exceed the earnings generated at Shutterstock - so read on!

We’ll also include six examples of actual best-selling content for each of the agencies disclosed by two veteran travel-contributors with substantial portfolios in each agency. These examples should assist you in focusing on which specific types of content may be best-suited at the discussed agencies to help get you on your way to maximize the earnings from your portfolio.

Lower royalties are hurting contributors

Before we get started on the analysis, it’s important to note that every single major agency in the industry is feeling the pressure to go lower on prices. 

The causes for the falling fees during the last few years are complex but mainly come down to an oversupply of content by contributors, combined with reduced demand from buyers. The situation has been recently exacerbated, particularly for travel content, as a result of the economic downturn caused by Covid-19 restrictions, although there are plenty of Covid-19 related opportunities if you follow the trends. 

Another factor to consider is the growing impact of free-download photography agencies, such as Unsplash, combined with the willingness of mid-level and enterprise customers to use those free resources instead of the usual stock agencies to cut down on their budget expenses.

Let’s begin our analysis by looking in detail at an agency that is, in the eyes of many contributors, on the up and up, Adobe Stock.

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1. Adobe Stock

Adobe acquired Fotolia Stock Agency in 2014 and created a unique offering by tightly integrating its Creative Cloud Software Suite with an extensive collection of 90+ million digital items consisting of high-quality, curated and royalty-free photos, footage, vectors, illustrations, templates, and 3D assets.

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Free Creative Cloud Membership for Photographers and other perks

Besides having a good contributor pricing structure, Adobe Stock offers its contributors some unique features that cannot be found elsewhere, such as free Creative Cloud membership plans. Contributors don’t even need to apply as access will be given automatically when a specific download threshold is met - see specifics here.

As for Adobe products, depending on the amount of contributor downloads, you can obtain either the “Photography Plan”, which includes Photoshop and Lightroom, or the “All Apps Plan” that includes Premiere, After Effects, Illustrator and 100GB of cloud stock photo storage. Depending on the plan you qualify for, you can save between $120 to $600 per year, which may even be higher than you would earn with stock sales at many of the smaller agencies.

Besides free access to Creative Cloud Apps, all Adobe Stock Contributors are granted a free Adobe Portfolio website and are now able to share their Stock collections on Adobe Portfolio for purchase. This can become a contributing factor for your earnings since Google is making it easier to license images through web image search.

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Other Advantages to Contributing to Adobe Stock

• Overall prices of contributor payouts are one of the best in the industry and sales volume is both predictable and stable, including single and on-demand sales;
• Adobe stock is a non-exclusive microstock agency, which gives you an option to benefit from uploading to multiple stock agencies by selling same collection of assets;
• The uploading interface is modern, easy to use and review times, as well as review consistency, are one of the best in the industry. Keywording tools provided by the software are are easy to use, keeping in mind that Adobe Stock take the first 10 keywords as priority (similar to Alamy supertags, more on them later);
• Although Adobe Stock doesn't accept purely editorial-only content, compared to other agencies, they tend to be more liberal when it comes to accepting images for commercial use, even if they contain small logo images and some branding information on the background. However, this is a double-edged sword as may present some potential legal risks which are beyond the scope of this article.

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Factors to be aware of when working with Adobe Stock

• Other than commercial content, only illustrative editorial assets are accepted. More in- depth description can be found here;
• Adobe Stock is quite selective about the quality of submitted content and strict on submission rules. This may be difficult for beginners and those contributors who tend to ignore submission guidelines. For example, post-processing the same image with multiple effects and submitting all of them, can be considered an “image spam” and can even lead to temporary account closures without notice.

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Adobe stock best sellers:

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2.iStock

Second on the list is another viable agency that can produce consistent sales is iStock, which was acquired by Getty Images in 2006. iStock is a non-exclusive agency that accepts both commercial and editorial images.
The good news is that for most contributors, sales volumes are high with repeat downloads, as iStock has a strong international network of buyers, especially via their Getty distribution channels.
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‍Factors to be aware of when contributing to iStock:

• Contributor royalties are one of the lowest in the industry starting at 15%, with some sales as low as 2 cents, which can be both shocking and painful. This is low compared to an average of 25% at Shutterstock, 30% at Adobe Stock and 40% at Alamy for non-exclusive sales;
• iStock’s keywording controlled keyword vocabulary makes it time-consuming to upload large batches, and contributors may not upload iStock photos via StockSubmitter, a popular mass-submission program;
• iStock monthly sales analytics are difficult to read, but there is great help provided for visualizing statistics on the free Todayis20 website;
• Only creative footage is accepted.
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Best-selling images from iStock by the two veteran travel photographers mentioned earlier:

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3.Alamy

Our third selected agency is Alamy, technically not a microstock agency since they shun the current subscription packages offered by the traditional microstock agencies. In addition, unlike microstock agencies, Alamy provides the option to license images as Rights Managed, both exclusively and non-exclusively.

In February 2020, Alamy was acquired by Press Association, the Group behind some giants in the UK editorial sector with the likes of Daily Mail and Press UK, which should lead to a greater reach in sales for in-demand editorial content.

Contributors have highlighted plenty of positives on contributing to Alamy:

• Industry-leading royalties at 40% for non-exclusive content and 50% for exclusive content (either RF or RM);
• Images are sold for relatively high prices in the range of $15-$300+. The good news is that most buyers don’t shop around for cheaper prices for the same non-exclusive content;
• Alamy’s contributor relations support is quick and contributor-friendly;
• Alamy’s buyers tend to search for more Editorial images / Live breaking news, and those images are not only sold for potentially higher prices (depending on usage), but are also easier to shoot, since they do not require obtaining property / model releases.

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Uploading to Alamy is a breeze

The process of uploading to Alamy is straightforward and compatible with most microstock submitters. The only difference is that Alamy requires contributors to provide “supertags”, which are keywords that are considered to be most relevant to your image and give a higher ranking in the search engines. See below how supertags show up on the Alamy Image Manager (under a blue star-shape):

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Factors to be aware of as an Alamy contributor:

• Since sales volumes are relatively low and repeat-sales are rare, contributors cannot rely on Alamy to generate a predictable number of sales every month. Contributors should really look at Alamy as a sporadic, complimentary income, especially if you don’t shoot many editorials.
• Which leads to the next point: You have a much bigger chance of success with Editorial content than with commercial images that sell on other stock agencies. If you’re not an editorial photographer you may want to give Alamy a miss and focus on other more commercially-focused agencies.
• Even though you’ve spotted an image, it may take you as long as three months before it shows up on the sales report, which can be frustrating.
• No stock footage is accepted, although this may change following the 2020 acquisition by Associated Press which may influence business decisions.

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Dealing with technical rejections

Perhaps due to the relatively small size of the Alamy operations, they approach image reviewing differently than other agencies by only batch-reviewing. The way it works is, let’s say that you submit your batch and only one image does not pass Quality Control guidelines (for being out of focus and/or noisy, for instance), therefore the whole batch is rejected, which may seem unfair.

In addition, multiple rejections may even lead to temporary freeze on uploading content depending on the number of rejections. However, supposing you figure out what you’re doing wrong by studying the technical requirements, uploading should become easier with time, as Alamy assigns rankings to contributors. The higher the ranking the easier for you to pass QC control and the quicker batches are reviewed.

Alamy top sellers (as expected a heavy focus on editorial content “people, things and places”):

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Other agencies you may consider submitting

We’ve covered the “Top-Tier Big 4” of microstock agencies, but there are more smaller agencies competing in the same field which may offer some supplementary income for the same images, which combined may amount to something substantial.

These agencies include DepositPhotos, Dreamstime, Yay Images, Canva, EyeEm, 123RF, Envato, Canstock, PicFair, Sign Elements, Zoonar.

In particular, contributors may consider submitting to the following two agencies from the list above:

·  DepositPhotos. One of the more successful of the smaller agencies, DepositPhotos have started providing a user-friendly way of uploading existing portfolios to their agency via a private FTP server. The rest of the work is done by DepositPhotos team, including image keywording and categorizing;

·  Canva. If your area of expertise is design-oriented content, such as backgrounds, flat lay photos, Canva can produce a healthy income supplement.

Submitting to niche book cover agencies

Book cover photography has emerged as a highly profitable alternative to microstock photography with sales up to $1000 net per image licensed. For more information how to sell your stock photos as book covers please read this recent post.

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Conclusion

The days when a single non-exclusive agency can provide stable, predictable income which is enough to cover expenses for most stock contributors are gone. The name of the game in 2021 is uploading to multiple sites, to increase your chances of being successful in this business. These include Adobe Stock, Alamy and iStock, which should provide you with additional income for the same non-exclusive images.