I will try to briefly explain about microstock and easy, because my own is still relatively "green" in this regard. Microstock is actually one in the world of photography term that describes a business that distributes the types of photos / images official commercial in large quantity and the price is very cheap.
What makes this extremely interesting world of microstock is that all people - both amateurs and professionals - can become contributors. As a contributor, we can gain profits by selling royalties from the pictures that we send. Committee system and of course prices vary, depending on each microstock agency. But in general, we will get some profit every time the images we downloaded from the site (about $ 0.25 to $ 5 per download to the non-exclusive contributors, depending on licensing regulations for each site). Indeed, a glimpse of that amount is fairly cheap. But wait, in this microstock business, every picture we allow to be downloaded many times a day, especially if we have a quality portfolio. Just imagine if we had 100 more images from our collections are not always the most downloaded once a day. That's about $ 750 a month! Fun right?
The drawback, now most microstock sites already have millions of images online, and thousands of images uploaded every day constantly. This causes a very high difficulty factor for new contributors to 'perform' and be seen by the market. Hence there is an ancient formula in the world of microstock is proven true: the more pictures you have, the greater the benefit to be obtained. I summarize some facts from the many blogs that I read about microstock, one of which is to earn revenue of $ 100 per month from microstock sales, we must have at least 500 images of quality in our portfolio. Some microstockers even reported that they 'only' be earning each month of $ 500 to 6000 more pictures on their portfolios. Plus, now the photo screening process quite difficult. Oops!
The sad fact? Probably. But do not despair first. The fact above is true most of ... for the photographers! Because my approach here is as an illustrator, may in fact be different. I think that I might have a pretty good chance here because I do not have to compete with drawings and photographs that have been a lot of saturation in those sites. It is my target market was small, but solid. Well, as long as I enjoy what I do, there's no harm in it?
This is what makes me inspired to start trying to explore the microstock world is ... as a vector illustrator. In this blog I will also try to document the 'journey' I honestly, both positive and negative experiences, all my achievements and my loss. Thus, the graphic designer / illustrator who are interested can judge for yourself whether this microstock business worth checking out, or just a waste of time.
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