01 Jan 2008 Microstock Earnings Report December 2007
Earnings were very low in December with the festivities having a clear impact late in the month.
I started a serious uploading campaign in December, uploading to all sites except Fotolia due to the optimization experiment (detailed below). Fast reviewing agencies are already selling the new photos, while others still have them in the pending queue.
I only received Extended License sales (3) at Shutterstock this month.
| Agency | Earnings US$ | Portfolio Size | Per Photo |
| Shutterstock |
184.55 | 641 | 0.29 |
| iStockphoto | 111.65 | 652 | 0.17 |
| Dreamstime | 70.05 | 553 | 0.13 |
| Fotolia | 23.31 | 469 | 0.05 |
| StockXpert | 18.20 | 123 | 0.15 |
| BigStockPhoto | 11.50 | 235 | 0.05 |
| 123rf | 7.30 | 127 | 0.06 |
| LuckyOliver |
6.60 | 173 | 0.04 |
| Crestock |
4.25 | 127 | 0.03 |
| CanStockPhoto | 0.75 | 367 | 0.00 |
| Totals: | 438.16 | 0.96 |
The Fotolia Optimization Experiment
Early in December, I ran my optimization experiment at Fotolia to see the impact on sales of re-ordering my keywords. To be fair, I only re-ordered the keywords on my top 80 selling photos, and most of this work was done in the second week of the month.
Despite these weaknesses in my experiment, Fotolia was one of only three agencies to earn more in December than in November (Crestock rose $1 and BigStockPhoto rose $1.50). However, the increase was only a few dollars, and still lower than the figure for October.
It seems that reordering your keywords – if you haven’t done so already – has a positive impact on your sales. In my case, the impact was minor, but my portfolio is also quite small.
I was hoping that my Fotolia earnings would jump up to a similar level as Dreamstime and iStockphoto like other contributors experience. Perhaps my photos don’t have the performance track record to rank well yet. If so, such a dramatic change will take a long time.
Observations:
- Shutterstock earned me the same as November, Dreamstime earned just below their average, but iStockphoto dropped substantially
- iStockphoto earnings were lower than last December!
- Shutterstock convincingly consolidated their top position
- Total per-image earnings dipped under $1
Stephen Strathdee
Posted at 11:59h, 01 JanuaryPerhaps some of your IS images have died – you should consider examining your portfolio with the goal of finding images that were generating income one year ago but are not currently selling. Spruce up the ones you find, then reload ’em!
Lee Torrens
Posted at 23:30h, 01 JanuaryThat’s a great idea Stephen, thanks. I’ll look into that.
-Lee
Marek
Posted at 14:50h, 01 JanuaryThank you for sharing your numbers. I must admit that I am glad to see that December was rather a slow month in microstock since I started submitting my pictures just a month or 6 weeks ago and I am waiting for some results …
Anyway, I described my first month experience in microstock in this PixelsAway blog post trying not to focus too much on a rejection theme:
http://www.pixelsaway.com/C911796005/E20071222100918/index.html
– Marek
James
Posted at 08:57h, 06 AugustCan you please explain how you calculated your total of .96/photo? What’s your total portfolio across all agencies (minus duplicates)?
Lee Torrens
Posted at 19:37h, 06 AugustHi James, this article is quite old and I would not recommend calculating royalties as I did back then.
In this article I calculated earnings divided by the quantity of photos accepted at each agency. This is ok to get a sense of performance differences between agencies, but summing the RPI for all agencies as I did was quite silly and not overly meaningful for making business decisions aside from watching changes over time.
A more logical calculation would be to use the total quantity of files submitted regardless of how many were accepted, and to have this number be the same for all agencies (that is, submit all the same images to each agency).
Regarding duplicates, like most non-exclusive microstockers I submit the same images to all agencies, so it’s not logical to remove them. They’re essentially all duplicates.
James
Posted at 20:47h, 06 AugustSo, if you divide the $438.16 and divide by the 641 total accepted images, then the RPI lOoks more like .68/ image?