Sun - June 1, 2008

Microstock Photography Earnings Report for May 2008



May was my 6th month in microstock photography and the second month with dropping down earnings despite of the growing porftolio. iStock and Shutterstock remain my two highest earner providing together nearly 80% of my income. All other sites were just staying together in the below $10 zone. No extended licenses in May.

iStock had a very good first week of the month, but ended up in very low sales during the last week after introduction of subscription. I didn't see any subscription sales. I had a record number of downloads, 70, in May, but mostly in small and Xsmall sizes. Anyway, I am getting closer to the bronze canister level with my sales (226).

I added a lot of pictures to my Shutterstock portfolio just to keep earnings at the same level as in April. The "return-per-image" is systematically dropping from 0.58 (or 0.37 without EL) in March to 0.28 in April and to 0.21 in May. I am not affected by the recent price changes in Shutterstock,

Fotolia earnings were nicely growing till April, but in May, went to a complete crash. I didn't have any downloads in the first half of the month, and then just a few sales. Low acceptance rate due to "type of photograph" and inconsistency in the review process remain the same.

Big Stock Photo and 123RF earnings are low, but they are slowly growing from month to month. Dreamstime was going down since March.

I had the first and the only one sale on FeaturePics.

I started to submit pictures to StockXpert a month ago. I managed to upload about half of my portfolio. No sales.

agency portfolio size downloads (EL) earnings return per image sell-through rate

iStock

206 70 $58.81 0.29 30.1%

Shutterstock

 222 186 $46.65 0.21 72.1%

Fotolia

 196 6 $5.15 0.03 17.9%

DreamsTime

 188 14 $8.10 0.04 19.7%

Big Stock Photo

 216 7 $7.50 0.03 -

123rf

 246 10 $6.63 0.03 -

FeaturePics

 151 1 1.53 0.01 -

StockXpert

 113 0 0 - -

total

 $134.37

Some other bloggers are reporting monthly earnings from microstock:

Anybody else?

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