The Wheel of Luck or the truth behind the Stock Photography business

Guidelines for newbies

Are you passionate about traveling and photography?

Have you ever dreamt of making your own living by doing the things that you really love - traveling and selling your travel images?

Well, then stock photography is not for you.

In this post, I will share my personal work experience in this field, and particularly, my personal experience with a specific, well-known stock agency, whose name I will not mention because, as it turns out, there is no freedom of speech even in USA, or at least, in this agency.

But although I will talk about the difficulties of working with this one particular agency, all the images that you see are screenshotted from various agencies that I have contract with. They all are taken by me.

So, where should I start?

Stock photography, like any other business field, was and probably still is, relatively profitable for those innovators who entered it from the very beginning of its creation.

But there are still people, who dream of showing their work to the world and getting paid for it, just as any other artists.

If you begin to submit your artwork to this particular agency, soon you will face the following obstacle:

There are some written rules that define which image will be accepted and which rejected, but most of the rules, you will learn during your work. Working by observing what others have done before you is not of much help. Because reviewers are inconsistent in their work and many times, when you see that contributors have submitted pictures like yours, there is no guarantee that yours will be accepted too.

Here is an example – imagine, it’s summer break and you have pictures of a famous Spanish beach, and you know that these pictures will sell because now is the time when many people or agencies write articles about the amazing tourist resorts in Spain.

But what happens – your pictures will be rejected either as objectionable content,

or they will be accepted as mature content,

that is, they will be hidden from the potential clients unless he or she unchecks the mature content button as a searching option.

What do you think? Right, there are numerous photographs of beaches on the site of this agency. None of them has been marked as a mature content, all of them are visible for the potential clients. No client will bother to uncheck the mature content button in order to find your pictures,

because it will not occur to anyone that pictures of people in swimsuits might be mature content. (I think we all are aware what exactly mature content means).

So, hiding your content from the clients in many different ways and different reviewing criteria is one of the many obstacles in stock photography.

But maybe I should have started with this question: what sells in stock photography?

Forget about quality, forget about expensive camera equipment, forget about creative ideas. Of course, all of this could help, but only if you are a “big” or very “old” contributor. Images that sold in the past still sell now and will sell forever, no matter how old and outdated they are, because every image has a place in a ranking and is being sold according to this place – either hidden from the clients or placed in the first places of their search.

All the time you’ll have to compete with the biggies. And this is unfair competition. Because it’s not about your skills and it’s not about beautiful images.

It’s about a wheel, not a wheel of luck, but a wheel guided, I should say, by a human hand.

And it’s also unfair, because you can never reach the biggies.

Why?

You have thousands of pictures from various places and of different things and you are motivated to submit them.

Then, what could stop you from achieving your goal?

Well, the company itself does it.

Right after I reached the exact quantity of 4500 submitted images, the reviewers began to reject my content.

It was a real fight getting other 200 images accepted. Observing the situation, I was able to divide the reviewers of the company provisionally in 3 shifts. The 3 shifts behaved differently, and some of them behaved really insanely or had no idea how to process my pictures. So, I could use only one shift that behaved more rationally in my opinion for submitting these next 200 images.

But when I reached the exact quantity of 4700 images, they just stopped the acceptance of any of my pictures. I tried many times with many different images, but the result was the same – rejection.

And it wasn’t until more than 2 weeks later when they began to accept my images again. Of course, they accepted all the images that they have rejected before, but during these 2 weeks I had the time to search the net for information about this company and about the experience of other contributors with the hope that I’ll find an answer of the question what the h^ll has happened to me. And this was the time when I found some unpleasant facts and information in stock photography forums. And this was the time when I asked myself for the first time – why am I losing my time, my efforts, my love and passion in vain.

But since the Covid-19 outbreak the reviewing system somehow magically changed and the reviewers began to behave more or less “rationally”, I continued to submit images until I reached again the exact quantity of 5700 and they stopped accepting any of my pictures. Again.

This is what would kill your motivation. Right?

The other thing is the earnings. My earnings change on a yearly basis, that is, no matter how many pictures I have submitted through the whole year, nothing changes. Something changes as late as January next year. And when I observe the similar number of the sales through the year, coming at a similar time of the day, I couldn’t help but ask myself whether the “wheel of luck” isn’t guided by a human hand, a programmer, program or a bot, you name it.

The company stopped my image submition for a third time this year when they introduced their new earning structure and reduced my earnings more than 3 times.

Guys, I’m sure you all have noticed how in times of crisis everyone reveals his true face. This applies not only to people but also to companies and institutions.

That’s why I no longer ask myself why I am losing my time and efforts.

I just don’t do this anymore.

I think, it’s interesting to mention what the wheel of luck did with my images after the earnings drop-off, but this post became too long.

And what I actually wanted to share with you was that, in my opinion, stock photography like many other businesses nowadays is a dead field. And when even the biggest and most renowned agency doesn’t welcome newcomers or treats them unfairly, then what’s the point of putting your best efforts and hope into it?

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