Great Escape Publishing has published its first annual
GEP Stock Photography Index 2020 which ranks, rates, compares and contrasts the top 10 online stock-photography sites.
In order the companies are:
#1 Shutterstock
#2 Adobe Stock
#3 Pond5
#4 Alamy
#5 Bigstock
#6 Dreamstime
#7 Stocksy
#8 Deposit Photos
#9 iStock
#10 123rf
The GEP analysis of each company may be helpful to creators trying to decide where to place their images. Most photographers place the same images on multiple sites non-exclusively in order to maximize potential revenue.
It should be noted that while Stocksy charges higher usage fees and offers photographers a higher royalty share of license fees than the others, it requires exclusivity. Thus, any images placed with Stocksy, and similars from the same shoot, cannot also be placed on any other site. Stocksy also limits the number of new photographers they will accept. Thus, it is questionable where Stocksy might fall in terms of generating the most revenue per-image for an image creator, assuming the creator places the images on multiple sites.
For comparison I decided to take a look
Steve Heap’s top sites.
Not only is he a very active photographers who has his images on 29 microstock sites, he also has been very open in sharing details of his stock photography business. He supplies monthly statistics on his
blog about which images are selling and detailed quarterly analysis of total sales. Readers can also find many of his reports on
Microstockgroup.com.
Steve earns about $36,000 a year from his stock photography. In my opinion he is one of the must successful microstock photographers in the industry today. (There are other production groups with teams of photographers and back office workers like Rawpixel and Wavebreak Media that earn a lot more money, but few, if any, individuals do better.
Steve works out of his home office/studio and does all the post production and keywording himself. He says, “I struggle to see how these outside agencies can get travel keywording correct at the level that I can - after all I was there and know exactly where the image was taken.” He uses
StockSubmitter to distribute about 250 new images per month to his agencies.
Steve’s top 10 list for the most recent quarter is somewhat different from that of Great Escape.
#1 - Shutterstock
#2 - Adobe Stock
#3 - iStock
#4 – Canna
#5 – Fine Art America
#6 - Pond5
#7 - Alamy
#8 - Deposit Photos
#9 - EyeEm
#10 - Dreamstime
Bigstock and 123rf aren’t in the top 10 and he doesn’t have images with Stocksy.
It is important to note that about
58% of his revenue in the last quarter came from the top 3 companies and the top 5 represented about
72% of total revenue.
Since 2017 his stock income has been reasonably stable despite the fact that he has almost doubled the size of his collection of images and videos since 2017. He says, income per image online has been “falling like a stone over the past few years.” His return per image online has gone from over
$0.60 per-online-image per-month in 2014 to around
$0.22 per month recently.
While most of the information on Steve’s blog is free, since the beginning of 2020 he has also been offering
Premium Paid Content for
$4.99 per month. In this restricted section of his blog he talks about how he creates the images and videos that are good sellers. He shares his thinking about what he will be creating in the next few weeks and gives readers a chance to come up with their own concepts and ideas before the topic becomes over-subscribed. He is not saying that he can do this month after month – but he will let you know what he thinks could become profitable and how he plans to go about illustrating it.