Do you sell your photos online? Have you ever thought about it? If so, we’ve got a sweet proposition for you: Hang out a shingle on Creative Market.
If you’re not familiar with Creative Market, it’s a site where independent creators from around the world sell their own “mousemade” content. Over time, they’ve expanded their marketplace to offer many different types of content made by independent artists: everything from illustrations to fonts to templates and web themes. This week, they’re taking their next big step: photos.
If you’ve ever designed anything digitally — a postcard, a flyer, a WordPress site — you’ve surely wasted at least a few hours stumbling through stock photo sites like Getty Images and iStockphoto. And you’ve no doubt been frustrated that the images you find are sometimes less than creative. Sites like Women Laughing Alone with Salad have became a running joke in the online design community (and beyond) because they spotlight the absurdity of big stock photo marketplaces that long ago turned away from offering beautiful images and toward providing staged scenes to fit well-worn cliches. The goal of every graphic designer is to create something authentic and real, but all that canned stock imagery can really work against you.
Creative Market’s solution to this dilemma is to help independent photographers to bring some authenticity and art back into the stock photo world. If you’ve got some skill as a photographer (whether that’s using a $5,000 dSLR or an iPhone), you can open up your own store and sell your work on your own terms. The benefit for photo purchasers is easy to see. Customers get to choose from thousands of photos from authentic sources that have nothing “stock” about them, but the benefits for sellers are quite distinct from other photo marketplaces. Creative Market sellers keep 70% of every sale. (!) They set their own prices. They don’t have to exclusively sell their photos on Creative Market. And, there’s no cost in opening up a store.
From a Pixlr perspective, we think this is nothing short of an amazing concept. Photographers getting an unprecedented amount of control over their work and how it’s sold? To us, that sounds like how it should have been done all along. All of which is to say we’re thrilled to have Creative Market under the same Autodesk umbrella and want to encourage any photographers who use our apps to check into this stellar opportunity.
Go see for yourself. If you like it, open up a store!