Stocksy was a start and remains my favorite place to go to
As you might have already figured out I like to try out new things related to what I consider my job. I was lucky enough to just had turned non-exclusive when Stocksy United was started, so I was a founding contributor.
A couple of new interesting places have opened their doors in the meantime. Some of them might not work out, others will take off and sky rocket. So far Stocksy has been in the latter category.
Shortly after Stocksy came to the market, Shutterstock has launched their premium offer Offset. There are things which I can’t try myself but thanks to my distribution partner Westend61 I even have some images on Offset these days.
Then the high quality image sharing community 500px decided to start their own market place Prime. A few weeks ago, I joined a photo walk organized by 500px in Leipzig, and most of the images I shot on that day ended up as my personal start on 500px Prime.
A few of my images made it to Shutterstock’s premium site Offset
And as the mobile sharing platform EyeEm had announced their own EyeEm market and a co-operation with Getty to distribute those mobile images, I also started to submit images to the EyeEm Market and the EyeEm collection at Getty Images.
So far on most of these platforms my portfolios are rather small and the time I am represented on them is very short, so – with the exception of Stocksy – there is not much return for those images. But they are all well above the microstock image pricing, and they all have very different concepts and ideas which images they accept. So having multiple places with different collections is a big benefit for me: Almost all images I consider worth being published can now find a home where clients can license them. Even if one agency doesn’t like the style of a certain set, I can still market them through a different channel.
And while I’m not a big player on either of those platforms, all combined my portfolios are slightly larger than 600 images in those premium markets. That’s certainly a number I would never achieved as an iStock exclusive considering that only Vetta images had been sold at a similar price level. I feel comfortable knowing that nowadays it’s solely my decision which of my images are going to microstock and which can only be licensed at a higher fee.