Blog Topic: microstock earnings analysis

Every microstock contributor has thought about it at least once: What if I just sold my work directly? No agencies taking 70% commissions. No rejection queues. Just clean, full‑margin sales straight into your pocket. The fantasy usually doesn’t last ...

A few years ago Adobe Stock started taking over Shutterstock as a top agency (in terms of contributor earnings), after the latter did its earnings restructuring in 2020. This is also reflected in 2024 survey where Adobe was number 1 agency with 15.4% ...

Shutterstock is a top-tier agency, if we judge by how complicated the royalties structure they have. More seriously though, contributors still rank it in the top-3 of the most popular agencies, as of late 2024. Even though contributor earnings vary ...

It is my great pleasure to showcase analysis of microstock contributor survey of year 2024. We asked around 30 questions via Xpiks website, MicrostockGroup forum, Facebook pages and collected incredibly interesting data. There are so many things to ...

Editorial images were always a backbone of microstocks, even before the development of generative AI. In the end, it’s much cheaper for news outlets to source content from local photographers than to send somebody to shoot. Also, it was a “secret” ...

When you’re working on microstocks and it’s time to receive your earnings, usually you have 3 options: Skill, PayPal and Payoneer. Sometimes the choice could be simple, as when only 1 option works in your country. However, the choice might be as ...

My experience with the microstock agencies Just a dream? Symbiostock Picfair Shopify Wordpress + Woocommerce Self-hosting My websites What’s next My experience with the microstock agencies I’ve been dealing with the microstock world since 2008, when ...

If you’ve ever wondered where to focus your creative energies, you’re in the right place. In this blogpost we are going to take a second deep dive into Steve Heap’s earnings. This time to see how much income was generated per category since 2007 and ...

If you have a passion for photography (or illustration/videography), you might have considered turning it into a source of passive income. However, it takes more than just a collection of photos to create a successful stream of passive income. You ...

Contributors report earning $0.08-$2.28 per month, while some of the best-sellers yield $87.7 per month (aggregated in 2022). With a literally over 1000 times difference between average and best-seller content it’s easy to see that full earnings ...

Do you want to upload your photo to microstock once and earn royalties forever? Don’t rush until you read this. It was October 2013 and it was almost a year since I registered on Shutterstock. Sad thing is that I haven’t earned a cent during that ...

Even though many people’s earnings already decreased during the pandemic, Shutterstock just announced an update to contributor earnings levels effective June 1 2020. Obviously a company would not restructure earnings levels that it would earn less ...