Review By Steve Gibson
Written 13 April 2008
Updated 24 July 2012
I have to admit a few years ago (2006) I thought these guys were a bit of a cowboy start-up without much chance of success, wrong was I! Dreamstime was a little later on the scene (2004) than some of the other majormicrostock sites but has now made up any ground that might have lost them, with more than 12 million images as of Jan 2012.
I now receive a quite good income (but not exceptional I admit), with downloads of most of my photos, including those that have not sold on other sites. Recently sales have dropped off a little, mostly likely due to my somewhat poor acceptance rate at dreamstime, I'm not certain that acceptance rate (the ratio of your upload photos that are accepted compared to those rejected) affects the frequency that your photos appear in the search results of image buyers, but something has led to a drop in my overall sales despite regular new uploads. It might be your acceptance rate over all time or just that of the past few months. The statistics section of the site gives you a view of everything you might need to know. Be careful what you upload to dreamstime.
Royalties
Dreamstime sell basic images at a very reasonable price which I'm sure has contributed to their success. As a bonus to contributors the cost of more popular images increases in tiers as the number of downloads increases.
Royalty rates on dreamstime are tiered according to how popular an image is. Popular images earn 45% royalty reducing down to 20% for less popular 'Level 0' images. Despite the change from the previous 50% flat rate this still offers one of the best royalty rates for microstock photographers whose photos sell frequently. Exclusive photos from non-exclusive photographers attract an extra 2-5.5%.Exclusive photographers are always rewarded 60% royalty on sales and $0.20 for each new accepted image.
Dreamstime Tips
Although I personally upload the same title, description and keywords to each microstock site, dreamstime place a high emphasis on the image title in their search engine. More than 25-30 keywords and your image may appear in more searches but will have a lower 'rank' (dreamstime secret sauce) and hence not rate as highly. Interestingly dreamstime rank each image individually, the overall upload quality of you as a photographer does not weight an individual image, so one good image can sell well from a batch of many bad ones. I'm not suggesting that you upload more images to dreamstime, although the effect might not be as pronounced I feel you could still make small gains by pruning non sellers from your portfolio - perhaps because your low selling images no longer show up as "more similar stock images".source (video interview on youtube)
Conclusion
I recommend this site to upload your whole image portfolio to, it should be included in your top four. They offer an excellent royalty rate to volume sellers, multiple language and European sales office base provides additional spread to your image portfolio.
From Dreamstime Website:
http://www.dreamstime.com/thread_11224
Our efforts to bring you more buyers have paid off once again. We have just started a cooperation with social-networking website MySpace. With about 235.000.000 members, MySpace is one of the biggest worldwide websites of all times. Using a Dreamstime image selection, MySpace members will soon be able to easily create and send real printed greeting cards to their MySpace friends and family's home addresses. This service is for personal and individual use only. Each greeting card will be of the same high quality as greeting cards you would buy from a shop; in full colour on greeting card paper. MySpace will actively promote this service to its members from the beginning of December in Europe. This is a pre-launch announcement. The official announcement for Myspace is scheduled in around one month from now.
Sounds good, 6-7c per card is pretty good compared to a one off royalty of a couple of hundred that is common in the postcard and calendar industries (after spending days chasing a sale!).
This should boost sales of landscapes, abstract and perhaps travel (local landmarks etc) which are normally poorer sellers compared to 'stock concepts'.
and your credit on the printed card - bonus!
Fingers crossed for some sales.
Site Administrator
(noted that the above was posted with suspicious/possibly false email address)
I guess I'd probably be thanking red for his offers of help (no matter how well hung he is :). The saturation issue is a bugbear of mine too, with almost all agencies. BUT it's not the agencies fault, the buyers buy them, sad but true - the agencies just supply the demand. It's taken me years to get over "leaving saturation to the end user". The ready to drop in images are the ones that sell, "cheap and cheerful".
An innocent angel loses it's wings each someone buys an HDR photo.
difficult for me to respond without seeing the images:
bad light on a sunny day - often sun makes the lighting too harsh?
keywords and descriptions should already be enbedded into your images so you don't have to do that for each agnency you submit images too - geolocations is a bit harder till someone sorts out standards: for your travel images they are worth geolocating for the future, again do it once embed and then never worry that much again.
sounds like your images were not that usable as stock photos (?) - a few iconic images of famous waterfalls will sell, as will some *pefectly* executed generic landscape with waterfalls, but those scenic subjects are I think a bit of a dead horse to flog. "Hard drive on fire, lots of paper balls crumpled up, things of the like" That's exactly what table top stock photos are about, they sell. not all the images are like that indeed, and not all sell as well as they don't illustrate a concept.
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