A realistic view of Shutterstock income for young creators

Shutterstock earnings

2024-04-04 14:17:41

Warning! Photo stocks prohibit the disclosure of income for authors, so we publish only general information that will give motivation and insight into this type of earnings.
Shutterstock is one of the largest platforms where artists and designers publish and sell their work. The requirements for illustrations are clear and achievable - the image must be at least 4 megapixels in size, in a separate column you must indicate whether the work is a photograph or not. When the first stages associated with registering on the site and uploading works have been completed, the question arises of how much and when you can earn on this site.
Case 1
The girl uploaded the first ten works to Shutterstock in 2019, all of them were approved. After that, she decided not to do any more, since she believed that this was enough to earn money. Her first illustration was submitted six months later and brought in $0.25 per sale. Afterwards, the account was filled with the following pictures, and within a year brought a certain amount to its owner. By the beginning of 2021, she still had not withdrawn her income, having more than 500 works in her portfolio, since she had not yet reached the minimum amount. The author is still happy with the result, since in the first year she hardly filled her account with new collections, and the uploaded illustrations are already generating income and are saved as examples for the portfolio.
Case 2
A popular YouTube blogger decided to conduct an experiment to see how much she could earn on Shutterstock. It was winter, she had a camera and took pictures related to the New Year holidays. A lot of photos had accumulated, and it seemed that now it would be easy to get an income. Screening services rejected most of the images. There were many reasons: focus, layout, noise, lack of model resolution, logos in the background and others. There are high demands on stock photos. In total, only four works were published.
Disappointed, the girl left this activity for about six months. After this period, in 2023, she received a letter with an offer to fill out tax information. Among the four published works there were two videos, and one of them brought in more than some income in six months. The author considers this a good investment of time, as he can compare it with running a YouTube channel, where it takes much more time to earn the same amount.
Case 3
A professional illustrator created custom images in 2023. The client chose several and a large number of works remained unavailable. Uploading them to stocks and earning passive income on Shutterstock seemed like a good idea. After seven months, the author can draw conclusions about his mistakes. The illustrations were not relevant to the topics, so the account sold only one work for $0.40, and perhaps this was influenced by the publication of this picture on social networks. The author did not plan to give up and built a schedule for trend analysis and regular publications. The results report looks like this - with her style of work, other sites would be more suitable for her. In the author's manner, complex art images that cannot be copied into several similar versions. Therefore, she realized that she could not compete in pace with vector masters or pattern artists. Her conclusion is that making money on photo stocks is not passive, but requires treating this topic as a full-time, full-time job.
Case 4
Interesting experience of two years on the lines. The guy passed the exam, uploaded a hundred papers to Shutterstock and began to wait. He believed that enough had been done for sales to begin and money to flow in. But this turned out to be a mistake. Within a month, the expectations were not met, and he deleted the tab and stopped visiting the site. Interest has dropped.
A year passed, the artist logged into his account again and saw that there was already a small amount in his account. Although he could not bring her out, he felt inspired. This was in 2019. Sales continued, and the author decided to devote 2 hours a day to creating images, and upload at least three images to stock every day. He increased the load, created and downloaded more and more every month. He loaded on three stocks, and in total he withdrew from them an income that exceeds the minimum monthly salary in his country. By that time his catalogs exceeded 6,000 works. The artist calls the main rule of success regularity, perseverance and analysis of results, as well as the need to invest time and resources for the future.
Case 5
The artist decided to conduct an experiment and uploaded his first works to Shutterstock in 2018. At the time, he considered it a risk of wasting his time, since the image sites were full of work. There was a fear that his images against the background of the rest of the stream would not be of interest to buyers. It seemed that the guy was wrong, and his work was in demand. This inspired me to spend more time on this.
Professional artists use several basic principles for successful work: interact with at least four sites, regularly upload new works, use tools to speed up and simplify work.
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