PHOTOGRAPHER JOBS, GRAPHIC contacthowimagesindextricksDESIGN JOBS, VIDEO AND AUDIO JOBS ...... THE BEST STOCK AGENCIES.
The best Stock agencies to work with are those offering their clients the best images, the best photography, graphic design, vector and illustration.
Selected as the best Stock Agencies based in our
previous experience:
We'll advise you about which are, in our opinion, the most interesting stock agencies, although it may be that in the future others appear that we will subscribe to.
Shutterstock: Most artists and photographers agree that this is one of the best stock agencies, possibly the best. If we had to work for only one, this would be our choice: Shutterstock. It is possibly the best archive or stock, with better content management, and it was one of the undeniable pioneers of the microstock format. The main reason for its success is that it offers its clients subscriptions which allow them to upload up to 25 pictures a day. This, together with a harmonic balance between editors, the artist community (which has a very active, friendly and educational forum) and the clients, who can obtain a good service, puts it at the top of our list of stock agencies. For this agency, there is a sort of test for being allowed to collaborate with them; you must upload 10 pictures of which 7 must be approved by the editors. On the test the editors are more demanding than usual. Personally, I passed on the second try, you are allowed to try again after a month. Shutterstock is one of those agencies where the percentage of the artist's commission goes up every time he or she reaches a certain level of accumulated earnings. Clients can buy their subscription, also “on demand”, or single images without a subscription, which generates much higher returns for the artist. There are also extended licenses, which earn the contributor $28 per sale and bring the total earnings way up at the end of the month.
To summarize a bit, Shutterstock gives more money to contributors without exclusivity than any other agency, it has a very simple and fast process for categorizing images, as well as for those that are rejected. If all sites were like this…life would be perfect.
Fotolia: is one of our top 3 stock agencies. As an agency, it generates important returns and we can do the categorization process in English or the main of local countries language. It is a very balanced agency and it has its own very distinct market, which reflects positively on sales. It is the agency that most often offers the contributing photographer or artist a higher quantity of images sold at a higher price than other agencies. If you work from Europe, the returns will be in Euros, whereas in every single other agency the currency is the American Dollar, which at certain times can be inconvenient due to having to exchange. This agency raises the sales commission of the photographer or artist according to the number of images sold since they began working. Each time you go up a category, your commission rises. There is also the particularity that photos sold in subscription are worth ¼ of what a photo sold without subscription is worth, however from experience we know that you generally sell almost twice as many images without subscription, and if on top of that you don't have to change from Dollars to Euros, it is easy to see why Fotolia is possibly the second best stock agency in our opinion.
Dreamstime: is another good agency, they are growing and they have a system to reward contributors, artists and photographers: the higher the percentage of approved photos, the closer to the top positions that artist's pictures will be in search results, so it is important to be selective and try to upload our best pictures here, since the pictures that they are less interested in will hurt our ranking and knock us down positions. Therefore the important thing with this agency is to upload the best, that which we discover to hold the most interest for the editors, and abstain from uploading less commercial photos so as to maintain the highest percentage of approved images possible. Another good aspect is that as an agency they give approximately 50% in sales commissions, which means this is one of the best in that area, possibly among the top 3 stock agencies. Dreamstime is a gamble we can't afford not to take.
Istockphoto: is a stock agency we should take into account that has very different policies, it has evolved in a different way and it has different characteristics than the rest of the agencies we have mentioned. What's the mystery? Well, their philosophy is to obtain a much more exclusive global collection of images, photographs, vector images, illustrations, video clips and music, with a higher quality filter. Therefore it is difficult for clients to find a mediocre photo among their search results. How does this affect the artist or photographer? Very simply, their editors are more demanding than the rest of stock agencies and really they are one of the agencies that teach the photographer the most about how to improve, although the photographer may not always agree with their reasons for rejecting this or that image. It is the price we must pay if we want to enter high couture stock. Istock was acquired by Gettyimages, big giant of the stock world, a reference point in this area and with this philosophy they truly help their contributors portfolios de be exquisite. To get in you have to perform a small test of uploading three images, all of which must be approved, so we recommend that you choose those three pictures well: they should be perfectly exposed, focused, without noise or grain and with a clear message. It is probably recommended more for professionals, who may not need the “training” but instead to develop our collaboration when we have a certain amount of experience, although it is all relative to the quality of images. It is true that you have to try to find out. If you can manage to keep an average of 50% of your photos accepted on Istockphoto by the time you have uploaded 250 images you have the option to become an exclusive contributor, in that case sales commission percentages raise drastically. It should be said that this is one of the agencies that pays its photographers and artist the most for the sale of each image, even if you aren't exclusive. In general, you can tell that Istockphoto's end objective is that good artists become part of their exclusive community. We should remember that exclusivity includes all of our work in the world of RF images, allowing us to keep working in other agencies managed by RM, discounting all the agencies listed on this site. This is a personal choice that only time and experience can allow us to make correctly.
Give your luck a try in this business!
