Rejected By Shutterstock

In a quest for ever more passive income streams, I submitted a batch of 10 of my favorite photos for inclusion on ShutterStock.com.  Unfortunately, I got a rejection message this morning from them saying I didn’t make the cut.  New submitters must submit exactly 10 photos, 7 of which must be improved for inclusion.  It looks like 4 of mine were approved, 6 were rejected. 

I have to wait 30 days to resubmit.  If I’m focused, I’m pretty sure I can get my act together and gather some more great photos by then.

ShutterStock’s commission structure is pretty cool.  Buyers subscribe to ShutterStock for a monthly fee.  For that fee, they get to download a ‘budget’ of pictures each day.  For $250 for example, you can download 25 pictures/day for a maximum of 750 pictures/month.  As the photographer, you get $0.25/download.  That doesn’t sound like much, but the subscription model encourages people to download a lot more pictures than they would if they had to pay a hefty cost per photo.

It sounds like successful photographers with a decent number of pictures on ShutterStock make at least a few hundred a month in commissions pretty regularly.  I don’t expect to make that much (submitting new photos frequently is encouraged but, obviously, quite time consuming), but if I could bring in $50-$100/month pretty passively, I would consider that a wild success.

Wish me luck, the 30 day countdown starts…now!

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