Graphic designer income

is there anyone who can share experiences about microstock to get a passive income from shuterstock or others

I want to make a content, from the fact that participating in the contest cannot meet the needs, can anyone give advice and tips for the content that I will sell there

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Here’s a nice summary and some good tips for selling stock – including giving you a good idea of how much you can make.

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I didn’t realize they were getting so little return. I’m wondering if she is talking about Royalty Free credit-purchased stocks when talking about the $0.33. I can’t imagine that being Rights Managed. The thing about Rights Managed is you usually have to be juried in at that level by the hosting company. Anyone can pretty much post Royalty Free stock (up to a point.)

I sure as heck hope a photog gets far more than $0.33 when I’m paying well over $200 for a minimum sized Rights Managed image.

And I totally agree about using your real name. As a purchaser for my clients, I know for a fact they do not want to have to be crediting DogBarf/stockcompany dot com in their book, museum project or the credit roll at the end of their video. The other part is sometimes they want an actual signature release from the photog, or they may need to contact for a model release if one is not included with the image. Stock companies will help with that up to a point, but if your name is there and you have a personal portfolio out there on the web, you are much easier to find and, once found, your options as a photographer open to a much wider range of clientele than a stock company can offer you.

It’s been a while since I watched the video. To the best of my recollection, yes, the income she was talking about was from RF stock.

Most of the people on Graphic Design Forum would be buyers of stock. If you want to know about the viability of being a stock seller, I suggest you ask at a photographers forum, such as https://www.microstockgroup.com/

I did it from 2005-2012 and it was a decent side income to my graphic design business. I uploaded my first batch and had 40 sales within a week. In 2005, there were about 10 million images available for licensing through the stock industry. Now it’s over a billion. Good luck getting noticed. If you don’t show up on the first few pages of a search return, you won’t get sales.

I quit in 2012 when they started pushing subscriptions. There wasn’t enough revenue coming in through stock sales to justify the time and expense of shooting. At one point I calculated my ROI. The work I put in during 2005-07 returned $400+ for every hour of labor I put in. Which was incredible. In 2012, it was bringing in around $3 an hour for stock work. It would have been a horrible financial decision to continue work at that rate of return, so I stopped.

I usually get about $0.33 for stock images that are acquired through subscriptions. I get 12% on the sale price. So, $24 on a $200 sale. The agencies give increased percentages of 20-35% if a contributor is exclusive to them.

I agree with Mojo that the chance to make good money doing this sort of thing has come and gone. Back in the late '80s, a co-worker and I ran a small ad in MacWorld magazine offering a collection of a couple hundred vector illustrations we had drawn. They sold like crazy for two or three years.

Today, though, there are millions of similar stock photos and illustrations to choose from. The supply totally overwhelms the demand and the profits are barely there — even if you figure out a way to get noticed.

I think the only way to realistically approach this is if you’re willing to sell rights to your work for pocket change. And that only works if you already have a whole bunch of good, but unused photos/illustrations stashed away and ready to go. Going out to specifically shoot photos or create artwork that might return a dollar or two every year just isn’t worth the effort.

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That’s quite a difference. Yikes.

That is really wrong!
And sort of shows which side of that business to be on.

So I see here the average from the comments here, it seems like it is not profitable if you want to live from the results of the design via microstock it feels indeed less realistic

Then I will look for other ways as a graphic designer to do it, is there any advice from you guys? I might be very helped, thank you all

Real Estate. If I had it to do over again, I’d have invested more in real estate. Two and three unit standalone houses were going dirt cheap about 20 years ago. Now this area is the newest Boston Suburb (a 50 mile commute but with a rail line) with rent going 4-6x what is was back then.
Good land, the kind that isn’t under water part of the year, the same. The house I live in has only doubled in value and is basically a “knock-down,” but the land it sits on? Nearly 4X because it is above the water table.

I wish I bought real estate too. Our landlord bought our rental for $695,000 right before we moved in. It is now valued at $1,600,000. It hardly seems fair.

What’s the best way to make a million dollars in graphic design? Start with two million.

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Real estate requires a substantial buy-in though.

Now, if I had bought $1,000 of Apple stock in 2004, and held it, it’d be worth $100,000 today. That’s what haunts me.

I don’t think there many lucrative side hustles in graphic design. Make as much money as you can at your graphic design day job, and put the excess income into investing.

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My wife worked at the competing newspaper to where I worked (which is how I met her). The newspaper where she worked was purchased by AT&T and the employee stock options needed to be cashed out (a real messy corporate takeover). This was about 1998, I think. So to avoid the big tax bite for that year, she invested about half that money in Apple stock as part of a 401k thing. She sold the stock last year, but it’s still tied up a 401k. Can’t wait to retire, but the trouble is she’s six years younger than me.

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So she probably bought it at the equivalent of $1 a share, then sold around $200.
Well done.

Friend of mine retired last year on his Apple stock. He bought it when it first became available back sometime around 1980. He won’t say how much he has, but he’s not suffering.

It was something like that. It was just as the first iMac was released. At the time, I strongly advised her not to put so many eggs in the same basket, but in hindsight, it worked out.

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