Hello folks, and especially hello to you, busy folks, because in this article I will talk about a platform which will make your life easier, if your main occupation is NOT microstock photography.
What is Wirestock?
A single place where you can upload your photos and they will upload them further for you on stock photos agencies. Tagging, descriptions and titles can be added, either by you or by their team. Commission taken by Wirestock is 15% from your earnings per download. The value you will see on your Dashboard is the amount of money you will actually get paid.
Content they accept: commercial, editorial, video (beta).
Agencies that they work with so far: Depositphotos, Adobe, Shutterstock, Dreamstime, Pond5, Alamy and 123RF.
Payout via: PayPal and Payoneer.
I started uploading my photos on Wirestock at the beginning of 2020 and recently started earning (so you already see the earnings come in pretty slow, as they have big accounts on each platform).
I have some PROs and CONs for the platform so let’s get to work.
PROs and CONs
PROs
- Intuitive GUI
- Option to only upload your photos to some agencies and not all available
- You can opt for Easy Submission on commercial photos/videos; this means that Wirestocks team will add descriptions, tags and titles for your selected photos
- Easy Submission tagging is a strong pro if you don’t like this part so much, or if you don’t handle english very well; I like it especially because they add details that I would normally miss (like scientific names for plants, or composition details)
- Easy Submission will also add places and landmark names in the title and description (and I was super surprised that they get right even the less popular ones)
- Processing time is 3-5 business days for newly added photos, but it happened to me to take fewer than 3 days quite often and also more than 5 days, but this is a rare event. When a picture is accepted to Wirestock and you see it in the “Submitted” category, it means it already appears also on the selected agencies and you’re ready to sell!
- Recommend Wirestock to your friends and get 3% of their profit (actually from Wirestock’s margin) in their first 2 years on the platform
- You can also upload footage; at the time of writing this article (nov 2020), feature is still in beta so I won’t insist so much. Once the feature will be stable, I’ll find some time to try it for you 😊
- Content that doesn’t perform so good receives a second chance with Instant Pay; you will be notified by email and of course you can opt not to have your photos available for Instant Pay (this means that free stock photos websites will be able to purchase once your photos and then give them for free on their website; average price for one photo is 3.4$)
- Given that they have such a big account, it’s useful to upload here content for the agencies which sell content based on rating (accounts with higher rating will be shown first in the search results)
CONs
- Editorial photos don’t have an Easy Submission (yet)
- Can’t figure out yet how I should promote my content to maximize my earnings. All the photos are uploaded to one single account which contains hundreds and thousands of images from all contributors. There is no way I can track my photos in this ocean of content 😅 This is a big NO if you wish to have more recognition and to build a public that’s yours.
Other remarks
Wirestock also has an exclusive program, which I haven’t tried yet. There’s the option to upload your photos only for specific agencies and for this you could earn a little extra per download. At the moment this option doesn’t look very tempting for me, because that extra percentage is – for the current programs available in nov 2020 – 7%. For this 7% you have to give up other pretty good agencies. But maybe this may sound appealing for some of you, so I have to mention it out.
Read more on their blog here.
I don’t know if you really care about this when you’re choosing an agency, but WIRESTOCK NOW HAS BADGES 😂 I got really excited about this update. What do you think? A pro, a contra or whatever? Tell me in the comments.
Huh, seems like I had a lot of good stuff to say about this one 😅 And to be honest, I am pretty busy day by day and barely have time to earn from my photos anyway so I would recommend it with all my heart if you find yourself in the same situation.
I also plan on showing you guys how my progress on this website is, maybe you’ll want to use my referral to sign up and also start selling some nice pictures. For you it’s the same if you sign up directly on the website, but please use my link to support me 😊
You may also find useful Wirestock’s FAQ page.
I tried to have every detail here, but if I’m missing something, please let me know in the comments, I’ll be happy to cover all the topics for you!
Didsss 