Although I did not have any BME in any of the microstock agencies this month and only one EL (Cutcaster), October ended up being my second BME overall. IS finished ahead of SS and FT was third well behind in term of earnings. SXP did pretty well and BSP quite stable. It looks like that sales finally dried out at 3DS which is a shame because it is my largest portfolio with 1500 + pictures. The review process ended up working against them maybe.... My pictures went live later in the month at Veer so it is a bit too early to predict sales there and where it will rank among my other agencies. I have now more than 1000 pictures online at Shutterstock and on almost all other agencies except BSP and IS. My total microstock earnings this month are just below $500 but if I add to this midstock, it pushes my earnings close to $600.
Videos
No sales yet to report but I am still building my portfolio and learning. So far, my largest portofio is at ClipCanvas with 52 videos and my smallest at Revostock with 9 videos which tells you immediately where is the fastest to push pictures. Pushing videos is definitely more time consuming than pictures because there is no IPTC system, yet...
I was dissapointed so far with my experience at SS and IS because of issues with ftp processing and very slow reviews. Pond5,AlwaysHD, revostock, Clipcanvas are doing a much better job and it is not surprising since they have more experience in this field. Isyndica platform was very helpful since I had to upload my 5GB of footage only once.... If you want to see the videos I have on sale so far you can have a look here.
I will see if I can push my microstock earnings pass the $600 mark in November before the traditionnal slowdown of December and the slow recovery of January.Stay tuned for daily updates on my twitter!
This an update of my post published last January about the evolution of cumulative RPI and $/dl across my microstock agencies.
Back then, my RPI was going down and my $/dl stagnating. Since then, I noticed that my RPI went actually slighly up and was stabilizing with an average value of 0.65 for the first 9 months of 2009. This is still far from its highest point of 1.11 of May 2008 but hopefully it will be back to these value some day:) As you can see on the graph below, the more noticeable thing is that my $/download went up constantly this year. As my sale volume did not change compared to 2008, my earnings went actually up (+50 % between Sept 2008 and 2009).
This increase in $/dl can be explained by several things:
Higher ratio of credit to subscription sales (volume of picture sold dropped a lot at Shutterstock)
The fact that using Isyndica I distribute now my pictures to 16 agencies compared to only 10 last year.
A larger portfolio (1000+ pictures) increases the odds of having extended sales.
A larger number of best selling pictures (especially on Istock)
This is a non exhaustive list, not in a particular order, of few things that came to my mind about microstock and that are organized in a Do's and Dont's list. I wrote it based on my experience with submitting images but most of them can be applied to video as well. Please feel free to add yours in comments.
Do's
Do keep uploading
Do spend time on keyworking
Do aim to simplify your workflow
Do submit to multiples agencies
Do prefer quality over quantity
Do submit small batches of pictures
Do backup your data regularly
Do find thematic niches
Do think about shelf life and seasonality of pictures
Do check your pictures at 200% for spots, chromatic aberration and sharpness
Do adjust contrast and levels
Do shoot horizontal and vertical
Do shoot what you like and sell but not always
Do shoot with the designer in mind
Do learn about new processing techniques and softwares
Do resubmit pictures if you they worth it
Do learn from rejections
Do participate in forums and read blogs
Do try to make sense of your stats
Do promote your work on social networks
Do invest in new equipment that potentially can add value
Do try to branch into new activities (illustration,audio,footage)
Do follow microstock business news
Dont's
Do not spend too much time on forums and Twitter
Do not check your stats every minute
Do not use a compact as a main camera
Do not take rejections personally
Do not take only objects isolated on white
Do not think that microstock is a get-rich-quick scheme
Do not take the same subject over multiples angles
Do not necessarily submit to every new agencies in town
It is time for an update to my post of last year post regarding microstock commissions. Six new agencies were added and lower and upper limit commissions are compared to last year numbers.
In a nutshell, sales commission depend on: type of sales (subscription or credit), resolution of your camera, agency exclusivity, ranking, etc....
Once again these numbers are not universals but related to my ranking, exclusivity and my gear: I have two cameras (10MP and 12MP), a bronze level at Fotolia with some exclusive photos there, some level 2 images at Dreamstime, sold more than $ 500 worth of pictures at Shutterstock but less than $ 3000.
So far this year these are the highs and lows I registered (extended licenses are excluded from the list):
Shutterstock : between $0.33 (subscription) and $2.48 (on demand sale). Same numbers than last year.
Stockxpert (subs opt-in) : between $0.3 (stockxpert, photos.com, jupiterimages subscription) and $5 (L size, pay per download stockxpert) . Up limit dropped from $7 last year due to the discontinuation of photos.com credit sales this year, drop from $0.5 on the lower limit because I opted-in for subscription sales.
Istockphoto : between $0.19 (XS size) and $3.36 (L size). Upper limit is up this year from $2.70 last year:)
Fotolia : between $0.31 (subscription) and $4.99 (L size, exclusive). Lower commission dropped from $0.36 last year. I however expect for the upper limit to be lower since my commission for exclusive photos dropped from 52% to 32% during 2009! you have now to be 100% exclusive to get a 49% commission (bronze ranking)...
Dreamstime : between $0.30 (subscription) and $3.75 (panoramic image maximum size, level 1). $3.32 (level 2 image, maximum size). Up from $2.70 last year for the upper limit.
BigStockphoto : between $0.5 (small) and $3 (panoramic image, extra large). Up limit was $2 last year.
Crestock : between $0.25 (subscription) and $1.5 (S size). Up limit up from $1 last year
123RF : between $0.36 (subscription) and $4.94 (Mega High XL TIFF). Up limit up from $4.5 last year
New agencies:
Canstockphoto: $0.3 (Fotosearch subscription) and $19.80 (Fotosearch regular)
Cutcaster: $4.70 (XXLarge)
Yaymicro: $3.69 (S size) - $7.38 (L size)
3DStudio: $2.40 (Small) - $7.20 (large)
Scanstockphoto: unique commission at $1.46
Fotomind: $0.9 (full resolution)
In the light of last year numbers, few conclusions can be made:
Fotolia is the agency with the more disparity between lower and higher commissions ($0.31 to $4.99).
Sales commissions are the highest for the new agencies, unfortunately sales volume is still very small:(
The difference between higher and lower commissions increased compared to last year (from $7.3 to $19.61).
Agencies where my commissions are stable: Shutterstock,bigstockphoto Agencies where my commissions are raising:) Istock, Dreamstime,crestock,123RF Agencies where my commissions are dropping :( Fotolia, Stockxpert
Looking at my average monthly sales commission (including extented sales) for the first nine months of the year, it actualy increased this year to $0.74 from $0.58 last year.
See you in a year to see if these numbers are moving up or down......
A quick memo about the requirements of the HD stock footage agencies I contribute or plan to contribute to. I will update this table from time to time but feel free to leave a comment if you find that some informations are outdated...Thank you.
September was a new BME and for the first time my microstock earnings (minus referrals) were above $500 which was initially my goal in 2009. SS had a BME this month (with 2EL and 9 OD sales) , the first one since June 2008 but IS is still number one this month (with 1EL sale), beating SS by only $1...
Another BME to report at BSP with a first EL sale and another BME at SCP with just regular sales which is quite encouraging. Amongst the newcomers, 3DS had a noticeable slow down this month with only two sales and Veer earnings graph is desesperatly flat.... No sign of life at YAY and Cutcaster either...
Luckily, sales at Panthermedia and SmugMug brought my monthly earnings just above the $600 mark.
As I mentioned in my previous post, I started contributing to footage agencies in September by sending HD clips to Shutterstock, Pond5, Revostock, Clipcanvas. My application is still pending at Istock and AlwaysHD. I immediatly wrote off Fotolia from my uploading list due to their low price policy. I will start disclosing my footage stats only next month since a lot of my clips are pending approval at the moment. The Isyndica platform was very useful to upload these huge HD clips and I can still decide to distribute them later on in few clicks to Stockxpert and Canstock if their footage sales are taking off.
Will October will be another BME? I hope so and you will find daily updates on my Twitter account.
I recently invested in a HD camcorder (a Legria HF 200, twin of the Vixia HF200 in the USA) to get into stock footage. In this post, I will talk about my first impressions about switching from photo and video and the differences I came across during capture and editing.
Equipment and capture
The HF200 camcorder is surprisingly small and light (340g). However, it lacks a wide angle lens. Luckily, I managed to get down to a 31.6 mm (from 39.5 mm) without any loss of quality by adding a WCON 08B converter. Similarly, the TCON 17B brings the 592.5 mm to a 859.1 mm. When I shoot video, my SLR viewfinder is replaced by a very convenient multi-angle LCD screen. If a 8GB card is more than enough to record 10MP raw pictures, it is not so much for HD videos so I am currently using a 16GB class 4 SD card. The Legria comes short in battery life since I can record only about 1h of footage. Often the battery gives up before the card is full which never happened with my DSLR. Unfortunately, replacement batteries are much more expensive than for my DSLR as well…
Like in photo, I use aperture priority quite a lot and occassionaly speed priority. I almost always use manual focus (which is surprisingly precise on the LCD screen) to avoid changes in focus while recording footage which happen sometimes when focus is set to automatic.
Photo and video are quite similar but also very different. The big difference is that in video you have to predict the action and how it will play. If we take the basic scene of a autumn leaf on the grass; in photo, composition, control of the depth of field, exposure will be the main parameters before pointing and shooting.
In video, these parameters are still there but you have to compose also with external elements like the wind and the light that can sometime make your sequence more powerful.
While I do not really pay attention to the wind while taking pictures, I learned that it can be in video, your best friend or your worse enemy. Wind can give some movement to a static scene but also if you don’t have a steady tripod it can ruin all your footage.
In some ways, I found video more restrictive since you cannot do vertical shooting for example and it is, with the HF200 at least, difficult to change the focus while recording. At the same time, video brings more freedom since you can pan and zoom.
Processing time….
Instead of processing raw files, I work now with AVCHD which is a compressed format developed jointly by Sony and Panasonic.
I found out quickly that if the AVCHD format sounds appealing (you take your SD card from the camcorder and open directly files from it on your computer), its processing can be quite a headache. Few softwares are capable of rendering correctly AVCHD and its conversion can be tricky (files have to be converted to Quicktime, the format accepted by all agencies). I am still working on a standard workflow but I found out that scenes with fast moving subjects are the most difficult to render properly in Quicktime. Apparently it comes to the fact that I record 1080i (i stands for interlaced) and that computer displays are progressive... I am not sure that HF200 progressive mode is really true progressive so following some advices I will shoot interlaced from now on, the customer can easily deinterlace the video if needed.
It comes with no surprise that processing videos takes longer than processing pictures (even when doing HDR or panorama). Process a 20 seconds clip can take anywhere between 4 minutes and 5 minutes depending on what corrections are applied. It can last more than an hour if you speed up your videos to do timelapse.
Process AVCHD files definitely put my laptop (Core2Duo 2GHz, 3GB RAM) to the test….
Storage of raw footages can also be an issue so an 1TB hardrive should come handy especially when you have to store these few GB timelapse videos....
Uploading
When it comes to uploading, there is a huge difference in size between photos and videos: if a 10 MP picture is between 3 and 5 MB, a 20 seconds HD1080 clip can be between 200 and 250 MB so the equivalent of about 50 pictures.... Uploading 20 HD clips can become a daunting task if you do not have a high speed internet access and I would consider that a 1Mbps upload speed is a minimum to work comfortably.
As I rather want to upload once, I use Isyndica platform to distribute my videos across different agencies. At the moment, Isyndica can deliver footages to Pond5, Revostock, AlwaysHD, Stockxpert, Shutterstock, Fotolia, Canstockphoto and Clipdealer. Amazingly, once on Isyndica platform, my 200 MB clips are redistributed in a matter of seconds......
Final submission
Unfortunately, there is not yet an equivalent to the IPTC system for videos which means extra work: you have to copy paste title, description and keywords in each agency. Until such system comes up, the best option I found so far is to open my Isyndica video catalog and simply copy/paste the different fields from there.
Conclusion
Stock footage has definitely its technical challenges: processing and uploading are both much more time consuming than for photos. On the bright side, it is an opportunity to learn video capturing and editing. Also on the money side, there are much less submitters in footage than in photo, prices are higher so it might be a good time to enter before it is getting too difficult (see my previous post). At the time of writing, Shutterstock have 138,000 clips on line (with more than 8 millions pictures) and Pond5 200,000 clips.
If you want like me start selling your footages online, I would recommend for a start Shutterstock, Revostock and Pond5 because they seem to be good earners for many. My referral links are below!
I will document my monthly footage earnings on the top of my photo ones, hopefully they will start soon:)
