If you'd like to increase your chances at making money by selling your photographs to online stock image sites, I have one word for you: research.
It turns out that each site is a bit different and can attract different types of buyers. The quickest way to find out what buyers are looking for is easy. Type in the search term of the type of image you'd like to submit, such as "lion". Make sure to search for the most downloaded pictures in that category. Then look at the top 40 pictures to find out what similarities they have. I did this on Crestock.com, and the results are below.
There were two main categories of images in the top 40. One was black silhouette illustrations of a variety of animals on a white background, where the pictures of animals on the page included a lion. The other was professionally taken photographs of lions in the wild and in a studio.
A quarter of the top 40 images were a collection of silhouettes. Surprisingly, although each page of silhouettes looked similar, several were produced by different artists. I'm a good photographer, not a good illustrator, so I can't take advantage of this opportunity, but hopefully you can!
If you produce a page with 50 animal silhouettes, that page has multiple uses. You can submit it to at least 50 different categories (lions, tigers, bears, etc.), greatly increasing your chances of financial payoff.
In addition to the silhouettes, there were four photographs of the adult male lions that showed off their manes. There were also three photos of cute lion cubs, two of whom were yawning.
So it looks like, on this site, female lion pictures do not sell well, so it's probably best to focus your time in other directions. However, if you can get your hands on a baby lion, encourage him to yawn and take pictures of him yawning in the studio, and you could have a winning photo!
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