Earning with Image Hosts: An Mini Tutorial

Popular websites like Photobucket and ImageShack allow one to upload pictures and share them with friends and other people. Wouldn’t it be great if you got paid for sharing pictures online?

In this post we’ll look at some of the image hosts which will allow you to earn money everytime your uploaded pictures are viewed by others. How does it work and how much can you earn?

How can you make money?

Sign up with a free account with either one of these hosts and upload your images from your computer through their online upload tool or software. After which, you’ll get a series of links which you can choose to place in blogs, forums, picture dumps or emails.

This link will show a thumbnail image of the picture you’ve uploaded and will lead to the webpage of the image host, where the full sized image is hosted. When anyone clicks on the image, they’ll get to see the full image and this counts as one impression.

All of these image hosts have payment ratios that are determined by the number of impressions. For example, Share-a-pic currently has a ratio of US $1 : 4500 impressions, which means that you’ll earn US$1 for every 4500 unique views of any particular image.

This means that if you have 100 images, each image will need to be seen 45 times in order for you to earn a dollar. Here’s the math: 100 x 45 = 4500 views = US $1.

Where should I share my images?

Making money with image hosts pretty much depends on you displaying your image galleries to huge amounts of web traffic. The more people there are who pass through, the greater possibility of anyone viewing the images. Here are some of the places where you can put your images to good use:

1. Websites or Blogs
2. Big Forums with lots of members. (See this list of forums)
3. Social Networking websites like Orkut and Myspace
4. Gallery or link dumps

How much can you earn?

It really depends a lot of factors, such as the type of images you are sharing as well as where you share them. For example candid pictures of Lindsay Lohan and Angelina Jolie do incredibly well in big general, celeb or gossip forums where there can be up to tens of thousands of readers for a single thread.

I’ve also seen people earn a tidy sum of cash by sharing pictures of desktop wallpapers and free stock photography through blogs and websites. An estimate: you could probably earn up to US $500 a month if you were extremely hardworking and really smart at promoting your pictures.

On to the list ..

I’ve been using some of these image hosts for a while. Each of them have both good and bad points and do note that all of them do not allow the use of automatic scripts, robots and spiders to generate artificial or fraudulent impressions.

Rate: US $1 per 4500 unique image views
Minimum Payout: $20
Payment Method: Paypal / 7 Days after request
Content allowed: No Adult pictures. No Gifs.
Referral Scheme: 10% of referree earnings forever/

I enjoy using Share-a-pic occasionally for my image hosting needs. Two main benefits it offers: Firstly, a mass uploader you to upload over 200 images at one time. You’ll also be able to copy and paste the image code for multiple images at the same time.

Secondly, you can put your Adsense code on the image galleries so you’ll earn money from the Google ads that are shown on your gallery page. They definitely do pay their users within 7 days and the admins are pretty helpful and responsive.

However their image approval process is not immediate, your uploaded galleries must be manually approved by an admin before you are able to obtain the image code to share with others. Note that regular users will be able to apply for automatic image approval after some time. They do also run pop-ups on the image page I’ll advise using Firefox and NoScript/AdBlock if you use their website often.

Minimum Payout: $20
Payment Method: Paypal / Once a month
Content allowed: No Adult pictures. No Gifs.
Referral Scheme: 10% of referree earnings for first 2 months

SCIPYM is a pretty basic image host with a very good rate. However I didn’t like the fact that you can’t FTP or mass upload images: the maximum number of image uploads at one time is five.

The referral scheme is also a little disappointing because it only covers the first two months of earnings for each person you refer. You can tag each image with a name and description, and this helps it to show up in search engine results for more possible image views.

SCIPYM is pretty new, so be careful. I would try to hit the minimum amount needed and request a payout as soon as possible to verify if they are legitimate.

Rate: US $1 per 2500 unique image views
Minimum Payout: $5
Payment Method: Paypal / 15 Days after request
Content allowed: Both adult and general images.
Referral Scheme: None Available.

ImageReverb is a filehost which primarily caters for adult webmasters or bloggerss, although they can be used for general purposes.

Pictures can only be uploaded via a zip file, which will be automatically extracted after it is uploaded. This means that you’ll have to zip your images before uploading it.

ImageReverb runs pop-up advertiser and is pretty heavy on ads, so stay away from that if you’re primarily using this host for website or blogs. It can be pretty irritating for your readers. As ImageReverb is rather new, be aware that the interface is rather buggy.

Rate: US $1 per 9000 image views
Minimum Payout: $5
Payment Method: E-Gold and Epassporte/ 1 to 3 days after request.
Content allowed: Both adult and general images.
Referral Scheme: None Available.

I do not recommend Image Fap at all. There’s an abundance of ad clutter all around the image, which often doesn’t show up because of the multiple pop-ups used by ImageFap.

They do have a pretty decent user panel with detailed statistics on your image views. You can choose to mass upload via a zip file or do it the usual way by uploading individual files one at a time.

Generally used by adult webmasters and porno enthusiasts, Image Fap is a huge nuisance to me. There are some though who still consistently use it. Beats me why.

Rate: US $1 per 4500 image views
Minimum Payout: $30
Payment Method: Paypal / 7 days after request.
Content allowed: No Adult pictures.
Referral Scheme: 30% of referee earnings.

ImageFly allows you to resize images while it is being uploaded and they offer the option of setting specific images as private so only people with the specific image link will get to see it.

Imagefly’s interface and image galleries are fairly acceptable and there isn’t much clutter around. I would prefer a more efficient image uploader and a better earning panel but what Imagefly offers is functional and decent. Worth checking out.

That’s the list that I have at the moment so do let me know if you think I’ve missed any other paying image hosts.