I never got around to writing that second part haha. I have been getting a nice passive income from my stock photos, but with recent rate cuts by Shutterstock and increasing competition my earnings are declining. For most of my newer photos, I'm now focussing on macrostock licensing, which means less sales, but much higher earnings per sale - and most importantly, I retain full control and can detect copyright violations and prevent ultra-cheap licenses for use cases such as selling prints from cutting into my own sales of physical photo products.
Nevertheless, I believe that stock photography still is a great opportunity to get started with earning an income from photography - if you have motives that are in demand that is. The market is quite saturated, so the photos that sell need to be quite unique.
When I started selling stock, I thought that the "generic stockphoto" kind would sell well, but I was wrong: There is just too much supply of very similar photos of beaches, flowers, sunsets, etc. and not so much demand for them. My bestselling photos are actually those that show a very characteristic thing about a destination, but that are not the primary sights for which there is a ton of supply already. These photos are standing out from the crowd and have commercial value since e.g. someone buying photos for an ad or a blog about a country is looking for a photo that the viewer associates with this destination in a positive way. These are some of my bestsellers, most of them sell great across multiple agencies:
https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/camaguey-cuba-warm-sunset-light-shines-399271585
https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/havana-cuba-december-2015-cuban-flag-412724059
https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/green-andean-landscape-afternoon-light-near-521212891
https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/melbourne-australia-on-may-5-2016-523031776
https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/swimming-holes-florence-falls-among-most-521213233
https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/snow-peaked-mountains-reflect-blue-lagoon-406037995
https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/pantanal-paraguay-august-2015-old-paraguayan-406369300
But even with photos like that, it's hard to land a bestseller if the destination already has a huge supply of photos. I found that the stockphoto market is very much driven by supply and demand. My bestsellers are photos from Cuba - I was lucky with the light since I visited in December and have some great photos, but I also have that from other countries. But Cuba has only a relatively small supply of photos (220k on Shutterstock) compared to destinations like Thailand (almost 8 million photos), but the demand for photos from Thailand isn't that much more than for photos from Cuba. My photos still rank quite on top when searching for "Cuba" ob Shutterstock, achieving the same for Thailand is almost impossible. In general I found that my photos from Latin America and Oceania sell way better than my photos from Europe and Asia, maybe because there's less digital nomads but also less local suppliers in these regions so many of my photos are truly unique.
The second category of photos that works for me are those that could be taken anywhere, but are very quite unique in illustrating something particular. I have a few photos with decent sales there, but they earn little compared to my bestsellers:
https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/rusty-barrel-oil-on-partly-black-521213089
https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/funny-portrait-brown-horse-white-stripe-523031917
For submitting my photos to agencies, I use the https://microstock.plus/ tool which is free for 33 photos per month per agency. In combination with their desktop software Stocksubmitter for tagging this makes it really easy to submit a photo to multiple agencies. This are my updated earnings until December, but since Corona and Shutterstock's rate cuts they have declined quite bit:
As you can see, it's certainly worth submitting to multiple agencies, though focussing on the largest 5-8 agencies is enough, the few cents for smaller agencies aren't worth the trouble with setting them up and calculating taxes and some have minimum payouts so high that I probably won't reach them for another 10 years and inflation will eat up a large part of it before the earnings arrive in my bank account. I've taken down my portfolios on some smaller agencies like Colourbox since they only have one license type which is way too cheap compared to the enhanced licenses of Shutterstock/Adobe Stock and other agencies.
That's the summary of the planned second part, let's see when I will get around to writing it in full :D
A fairly complete summary, thank you.
I hope you do very well and continue to travel around the world. Thank you