Hey man,

I was just about to add a product to ThemeForest, but I saw that we only get 25%. Srsly, I throught WTF then, 65%+ man! We’re doing the big load of the work, go Adsense Style on this.

Cheers

I never thought about selling stock in between jobs. Good piece of advise. Thanks!

I might have to try my hand at this. Thanks!

I had my shy attempt of joining audiojungle. Phew… my advice is stick to something you know well, or you could find yourself splitting your time and energy in two separate ways.

I’m doing it thought so that they may one day meet again. I mean, how awesome would it be to be the motion designer, graphic artist, director and musical composer of your 10 minute clip?

Yep, I may be thinking TOO far in the future… I guess it may be a while before these treads begin to tie a common rope.

Alex

I joined istock years ago and submitted a few photos. I’ve probably made $50 over something like 4 years but I haven’t tried at all. This post really inspires me to have another crack at it. Even if it’s only enough to pay my phone bill each month it would be well worth it.

Collis - I really admire the fact that you even mentionned ultrashock in this article. I know about the rivalry between Flashden and them, and as much as i admit that I’ve visited the Ultrashock website, i much prefer FD for its ease of use and the great design you came up with !

I spent the last two years shooting lifestyle stock pictures part-time, and designing Flash websites with the other half of my time.

In fact, i will be launching my own imagebank in the next month. It wont be micro-stock and will be geared exclusively towards ad agencies. So i hope LONG LIFE TO STOCK SITES !

Great article. I have been thinking about creating some images to sell to stock. Sounds like a great way to make some passive income. Thanks for the inspiration.

Yes, this is true. There much more other agencies out there. For example http://www.Pixmac.com seems like the most easier to use for me. And some agencies are selling not just photos, but also movies. The best photo oriented are Fotolia, StockXpert and mentioned iStock… for me.

Collis, you’re too humble about your illustration skills. A few months ago I saw a stock illustration which was made a feature on the iStockphoto site and I’m pretty sure it was one of yours. Your story is very encouraging.

My wife has credentials as winning a national teacher award in my country. She’s thought about writing several eBooks on her topic, or reveiw other well-known books in her field, using OpenOffice and publishing to PDF. I guess we never thought about using sites like lulu.com — she was going to just bring up a WordPress thing like this site. But it’s got the gears moving here to consider Lulu, and to think about all the digital photos we’ve taken over the years of various scenes that might be worth it to someone. I mean, ‘might as well throw it out and see if it works. Otherwise, it collects dust in a drawer.

Really good advice! I’ve got loads of old Flash work that could be turned into useful standalone components - just wish I had the time between projects to do this!

Great Article, Collis. It’s so refreshing to see someone being up front and honest about money. Most people would try to keep it a secret, which I think is part of the reason the world is in such financial trouble. Those that are making a killing don’t let anyone know how rich they are - or we’d all be screaming for some of that wealth to be redistributed to the poor

iStock, and FlashDen are great models for both the companies and the contributors.

One issue I would like to raise about iStock is the risk of having the images’ copyrights exploited. A dear friend mine, Yiyiing Lu has sold a lot of iStock images too, and is finding that people are taking her images and making all kinds of products out of them - products you would expect to earn a royalty from - handbags, t-shirts, gifts, tea-towels, etc. iStock doesn’t police their licensing that well, and/or actually allow a huge amount of copyright under the basic license. Yiying had one image bought by Biz Stone, of Twitter - she made a grand total of $2.50 and the image became a world-wide sensation as Twitter’s “Fail Whale”, being seen many millions of times. It still came under the standard license - BUT she has certainly made a name for herself as the creator of the Whale, and is getting more freelance work as a result. It’s just a different way of operating to the old fashioned ways designers would license their art. At times it can seem quite unfair by old standards, yet the opportunities are far more diverse and unpredictable.

Keep up the awesome work, Collis!

Great thinking Collis. Good to hear that you can actually make money at this. Will have to get my act together and have a go at a few illustrations

Thanks for this information–I pretty much suck at illustration, but the audio loop thing could make some sense for me. Gotta go dust off the MIDI keyboard…

Yeah, stock is definitely a viable income but it is not a freebe either. There are a lot of photographers making a living at this and the numbers are growing all the time.

I am suprised though that you missed all of the ‘big 6′ in your list of top stock sites.
http://www.microstockgroup.com/index.php?action=pollsresults

Back in the day, electronic greeting card sites were advertising for submissions. Is anyone making money in this field? If so, where?

- Robert

Wow - there are so many unrealized outlets for designers. This was an incredible post, thanks! iStock will either love or hate you after a few hundred of us apply today

In that i have a techually active lifestyle, i find myself tackling tech issues on a daily basis, whether i’m transferring to a new cell phone or developing a liquid layout using css. i’ve started saving my notes on such efforts. i’m making an effort to leverage those bon mots…not unlike what u’ve done with ur production fruits. hence, i find ur article inspiring… [i’m also using u right now to see if my newly registered “gravatar” (http://en.gravatar.com/) will show up with my signature. peace.]

I was hoping I would also see websites selling prewritten content.

Collis, what sort of images were these? like the rendered egg-timer you have used to illustrate the story?

like some of the comments I too joined istock many years back with the intention of covering costs of buying stock images, but soon earned a lot more than that.

You seem to earn a lot more than typical across the industry which is $1 or less per image per month on one of the major sites like istock, but if your images are good then you can earn a lot more than that
(particularly it seems for more difficult to produce rendered images). Casual microstock contributors often report than much of their earnings comes from just a hand full of popular images. If you you have the right style of image that sell well then you can go full time and earn a living selling microstock

I never really thought about doing stock stuff. I have a bunch of leftover digital pictures that I haven’t even looked at in ages, but might be useful to some people.

I’ve found that there are a few ways of doing stuff like this. A long time ago I made some designs for Shakespeare bookmarks that I had printed and sold to Bookshops at Shakespeare festivals. They did ok, but I think I only barely made back the printing costs. After a while I learned about CafePress and decided to post my Shakespeare designs up there. I don’t make a lot, but every once in a while I’ll get a check in the mail and every year or so I make about $300. All this for doing next to nothing.

http://www.litheads.com is the cafepress where I have my illustrations for sale.

The thing that I like most about this is that these are all designs that I already had done. I created them and so I own them and can do whatever I want with them. I’m a big believer in repurposing work that I’ve done as often as I can to get the most mileage out of it.

Sometimes I wonder how successful I could be if I actually tried and promoted it all and kept adding new designs. There are definitely opportunities out there for anyone willing to put in a little work. And good money for those who don’t mind MORE work.

Hey Collis,
That’s a neat idea.
As a web developer, I sometimes shoot pictures, I’ll give it a try
Thanks.

This is an excellent Idea! I used to sell stock images a long time ago back before the internet.. But, now that I can actually monitor and track it using these websites, it sounds like a much more stable option. Thanks again for the links!

Only problem with this is that these sites want my Social Insurance Number
to sign up!!! I’m not giving out my S.I.N. over the internet!!!! That’s NUTS!!!!

So much for THAT idea…

Yo,
Ive been looking for something like this. I wanted to make templates but this is just as good as a side hustle. I am a freelance. I’m not the best web designer, and I don’t know what kind of validation goes, but I will try it out.
I appreciate it.

The only problem I have with selling stock is thinking up new, unique ideas to sell. I know - that’s always that hardest part - but you’d think that I’d be able to come up with some good ideas in all these years…

Great article, by the way! It really makes me think about how I spend my extra hours.