John at work mentioned that his wife has been selling her digital photos on the web using iStockPhoto.
This piqued my interest, so I looked into it a little bit. I like to think that I’m a reasonably good photographer, so why not try and sell some of my photos?
But where to sell them? iStockPhoto seems interesting, and is free for the seller, but you don’t earn very much when you sell a photo – between $0.20-$0.60 per download.
Then there is ShutterPoint. ShutterPoint costs money to get into as a seller – something on the order of $9.00 for 50MB of space for 6 months. That’s not too bad. The other deal with ShutterPoint is that you set the price for your photos (I see prices ranging from $20 – $60) and ShutterPoint takes 15%.
So what to do?
I think I’ll sort through some of my photos and pick a nice bunch. Then I’ll open an account at ShutterPoint for 6 months and see what happens. It’s only $9.00 after all.
If I don’t sell anything in 6 months, then I’ll close the ShutterPoint account and open a free one at iStockPhoto. Or just give up.
I’ll have to see what images I choose and might have to try and get some model releases… Or simpler would be to not use any photos with people in them.
