Stock photos are a necessity for all bloggers. In this post, I will review Fotolia.com — a royalty-free stock photo site for bloggers.
About Fotolia.com
Fotolia is a website that features hundreds and hundreds of royalty-free stock photos that are perfect for bloggers, website designers and other users of the Internet. The website offers subscription-based services or the ability to purchase individual images on an as-needed basis.
My Experience Using Fotolia
I use a lot of stock photo websites for our various creative projects. Often, for blog posts, I resort to free stock photo sites because I don’t necessarily want to purchase a photo for use in a blog post. So, for me to get great value out of the site, I’d need to find income-generating projects to use the photos with (ie: e-books, info-products, etc.)
When I was using the site, I had a subscription service which meant I could download up to 5 images per day. The subscription may not be the best way to go though because if you forget to login and download your images each day, the cost per photo goes way up. I prefer the idea of the pay-as-you-go / credit system so that you don’t lose your credits if you don’t login and download the images each day.
The other issue with a subscription-based service is that I sort of felt forced to choose images and didn’t always have something in mind to use them for. I found myself getting buy now buttons and other generic, webby images so that I could use them on any project.
Fotolia does have an awesome selection of photos and I didn’t find myself searching very hard for what I needed. Their search function is simple and effective and the photos are tagged very well. That makes finding photos for your blogs very easy and very quick.
The sign-up process is straightforward and easy to navigate — even for the non-techhie. Using the account is also straightforward — choose the image you want, add it to your cart and download the image. The nice thing about the download process is that you can download individual images or, if you have chosen many, you can download a zip file.
How Fotolia.com Stacks Up
Seeing as there are a multitude of stock photo sites on the Internet, I wanted to do a little comparison between the sites to see how Fotolia.com stacks up against the competition.
Let’s first look at pricing…
- Fotolia is $249/month for 750 downloads
- iStockPhoto is $363/month for 900 downloads
- Shutterstock is $249/month for 750 downloads
- Big Stock only sells via credit packs and is much more pricey than all listed options
- Dreamstime is $238/month for 758 downloads
- Fotolia gives a commission from 25% to 63% for content sold via single-image download and from $0.30 for content sold via subscription download
- iStock pays contributors a base royalty rate of 15% for each file downloaded. If you are an Exclusive contributor you can earn up to 45%
- Shutterstock’s contributor guidelines are: it’s free to contribute and you’ll earn $0.25 to $28.00 per image download.
- At Big Stock: For Pay As You Go purchases we pay you 30% of the US dollar price every time a customer downloads one of your images (up to $29.70 for an extended license). For purchases made using credits we pay $0.50 USD for each credit spent. You can request a payout when your earnings reach $30.
- At Dreamstime the referral is as follows: for each transaction, the photographer receives a 30-50 percent fee. Exclusive images receive an additional 10 percent bonus, while exclusive photographers enjoy a 60 percent fee and an additional bonus of $0.20 for each approved submission.
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