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Making Money with Stock

How much money can I make? Like can you really make money, right? And so, this picture is what I use to illustrate the answer to that. I answer the question with a question, like how long is a piece of string? Totally depends right? There's no one, how much money can you make? It depends on how much effort you're willing to put into it. We've got photographers that create amazing content, week after week they submit on a regular basis and they're making deep six figures, right? We've got other contributors that submit a couple of pictures here and there, they make a couple of bucks here and there, and they're cool with that. Those are the two extremes, the average is somewhere in the middle. It's a massive marketplace, Adobe Stock, Adobe has a huge customer base and stock is in demand more and more every single day. It is not, by any stretch of imagination, a get rich quick scheme. You cannot expect to upload a picture of the Eiffel Tower and then retire, you consistently upload, creat...

e content, it's in demand, stay ahead of the trends, you can make as much money as you want. The potential is limitless, and so, when you get started, it's a micro stock business model, it's based on volume. And so the price structure is fairly low, the volume is very high. You might get an email notifying you, hey you got your first sale, congratulations! And you open it up and you go, 33 cents? Hmm, thanks Adobe, a couple more of those, I can buy that newspaper I've been savin' up for, alright! (audience laughs) So that can be kind of discouraging right? Well then the next day you get a 33 cent sale and then a 99 cent commission, or maybe two or three 33 cents and a 99 cent, and then the next day you get $1. plus a couple of other ones, and then $3.30, and then $7.40, and then $28.50. And so the way you make money, like this is what I wake up to on a pretty regular basis. I go to bed and I'm makin' money while I'm asleep. Sometimes I'll have 100 sales in one day and there's a lot of those 33 cent ones, there's some of those $28 ones, there's some of the $3.30 ones, and so for me, now that my portfolio's established and I'm consistently making sales, I'm not looking at the individual sales notifications and going 33 cents, I'm sayin' how much money am I depositing in my bank account at the end of the month? It's the combined effort. And so some people will say, well geez, forget that, I'm sellin' fine art prints for $5,000. Well don't submit that to stock, good for you, keep doin' that, but you probably have some content that you're not selling at $5,000 a pop, maybe you're trying to, but you're not, or whatever, and so that's the stuff that I submit to stock. I don't submit all of my work to stock. I showed you before, I shoot editorial and entertainment, that's one part of my business model, stock is another. And so I don't pay all my bills with my micro stock accounts, but I can't pay all my bills without that income. And so that's how I make money using stock. So hopefully that makes sense. And then here's the specific details, the commission rate is 33% of the price that's paid. The price paid varies by how many images a customer commits to buy. So the Reader's Digest version is the more they buy, the less it costs per image, but the higher volume is, and so they can buy a single image for $9.99, you get paid $3.30 on that. They can buy 10 images for $29.99, so you get paid $1.65 on each one of those downloads. They can buy 750 images for $199.99, that's super cheap per download, but there's so many of them that comes in. We have a minimum payment amount that's in place, and so you're not getting 33% of that, 'cause it'd be very small, and so that minimum payment starts at 25 cents and it goes up as you sell more and there's a scale and there's information on that in the learn and support page. So again, when you're creating stock, so I'm just gonna show you a quick video that kind of demonstrates one of the advantages why Adobe Stock is finding such great success. And so this is kind of a tongue in cheek video showing Adobe Stock in use from the customer's perspective. Hey Dom have you got a sec? Um, yup. Great, 'cause the client's gonna be here really soon. (drum music) You know I've got this amazing ad for the new ginger beer. Uh, yeah. Playful but rough, but also epic but quite modest at the same time. Do you know what I mean? Um. Great, so if I leave you, what, an hour? Is that enough time? Oh. Well it's not finished, but. No clearly, it needs to be more manly. Give him a beard. [Graphic Designer] A long beard, or? Yeah. [Graphic Designer] A stubbly beard? Yeah, long. [Graphic Designer] Like dwarf long? No, not that long. [Graphic Designer] Okay. Well, he's Mother Nature, but then he's also like Father Nature as well. (audience laughs) Asexual? Ooh, maybe we should add some wolves. No, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, that's, no not a whole pack. So? Do you know what? I was right, we do, we need a whole pack of wolves. [Graphic Designer] I suggested that. Oh Kim, Kim, Kim, Kim. What do you think? Check it out. Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow. Wow, really raw, nice work, okay. From a strategy perspective though, millennials are 58% more engaged when there's a kitten in the advert, so can we work that in somehow? Oh by the way, the client is here. Kittens don't work, but what about a baby bear? Whatever, thank you. [Graphic Designer] Just a baby? Just a baby bear there, baby bear there, right there, right there, right like baby bear. Alright, okay, okay. Okay, two pixels to the left. [Graphic Designer] Okay. Two pixels to the left, bigger, 10% bigger. Alright, stop, perfect. [Graphic Designer] Yeah? Yeah. (audience laughs) Okay, done. (upbeat music) So yeah, so that's like, it's funny, but it's a clear example of the advantage that Adobe Stock customers have, and so if they're already working in Illustrator, or in Photoshop, or whatever Adobe program they're working in, in the library panel is a search for stock panel, they can type in baby bear within Photoshop and all these images are gonna appear in their library panel. They can drag that low-res, watermarked comp into their project, flip it upside down, make it black and white, make sure that it matches their needs, and then they like it, they get their client approval or whatever, they just click the license button, the watermark is removed, the image is converted to full res, but the edits stay in place, which is far and above better than the customer experience at other sites where you have to download the comp, go back and redo the edits after you find it and whatnot. And so that's a huge advantage, and then once they click license, then the commission is paid into your contributor account immediately, and so it's the full marketplace, from contributor to customer, all within the Adobe applications. And so it's a really big advantage. Real quickly how to sign up, again, contributor.stock.adobe.com is the main link, and I mentioned to you if you already have an Adobe ID with a Creative Cloud account, that's great, just click that continue with my Adobe ID icon. If you don't just create an Adobe ID free, easy, super fast to do. You'll sign in here, it's gonna ask you are you currently a Fotolia contributor, I mentioned Fotolia's that existing agency that Adobe acquired, so Fotolia contributors are able to sync their accounts with Adobe Stock. If you are not a Fotolia contributor, then, you would know if you were, and so if you're not, just click no and move onto that, and then you see the upload circle first thing. Drag your images into the upload icon. Quick question, what type of limitations do you have for use of the images after you upload them to Adobe? You as a photographer? Yeah. You have no limitations, it's your image, you can do whatever you want with it. And so, yeah. Any other questions? 'Cause that's pretty much it for what I have right now. Yes ma'am, go ahead, fire away, let's do it. So how would you go about handling it if say, you had an image up, you had a minor model release signed, you've sold that image several times, 10 years later that child is now an adult and says, I don't agree to this, I was not an adult, I didn't want my mom to sign that, I want you to take it down. How do you handle the images that have already been sold and used? The images that are being sold and used, the license is valid and it's permanent, and so that can't be revoked. The model release is a legally binding document, and so as a photographer myself, if a minor model came to me, ethically I would feel compelled to take it down, but legally. They couldn't sue you for it? It's a binding document, that model release is legal, the parents had the legal authority to sign, but you can't revoke the license once it's out there. You can delete your content any time, you upload it, you can remove it, but the licenses that were issued are binding and permanent, you can't revoke those. And then one more question, when it comes to photographing children, say I have a photo that I took of my son when he was about a year old and he was running around the yard naked, and he was standing next to the nude beach sign that my mom has hanging on the fence and I snapped a picture, and it's his naked baby butt. Yeah, we won't take that. You don't take stuff like that. Yeah, it's a nude child, it won't be accepted. I didn't think so, but I thought I would ask because, you know, kids. Yeah, adults, if there's nudity, tasteful nudity, that's gonna be, that's one thing, and you have to put an ID of the model on there to confirm that they're over 18, but children no. Yes sir. Kind of strange, is there any way to put restrictions on how to use that content? No. Like I was looking at the back of your laptop, it's got this plane, someone could take plane and composite in different situations, but you can't say, you can't use this photo in certain situations? Yeah, that's a really good question. It's a commercial license, the standard license is really broad use, and so I recommend that you read it and make sure that you're comfortable with it, 'cause it can be used in many ways. There are some restrictions, but you as a photographer can't set them, that's the same restrictions that apply to any customer that buys it. The most obvious is that the image can't be used in a way that could be perceived as offensive by the model, so no dating websites, adult sites, no tobacco campaigns, or political campaigns, or anything that could be perceived as offensive, but otherwise, like I said, box of cereal, billboard, magazine advertisement, or whatever, it's generally pretty broad use. The print run limit is 500,000 copies, so it's a really generous release. It's standard with the industry, there's not many deviations between agencies, but that is something that you as a photographer should make sure that you're comfortable with before you move forward.