March 2010 earnings

Summary

This month was a BME for microstock (beating  September 2009) with combined  multimedia royalties reaching  over  $700. It is  also the first  month I've sold photos, videos and audio alltogether.Microstock photos alone had a  70% increase in earnings compared to March 2009.

Isyndica Analytics graph

• Photos

More than 1000 photos were licensed this month, but no extended sales to report. Shutterstock was once again the best agency followed closely by Istock and Fotolia (first BME since 2 years....). Depositphotos ranked 4th due to their promotion program but I expect to go way down next month. I have also a BME to report at  GraphicLeftovers, the easiest agency to contribute  if you are an Isyndica user. No sales at all this month at 3DS, Mostphotos and Cutcaster. Taking into account the 17 agencies, cumulative RPI was quite stable  at $0.8 compared to last year. The average $ per download went down to $0.58 to the large volume of sales at DepositPhotos.

Thanks to Lee Torrens from Microstockdiaries and Amos Struck, you can see my 2009-2010 earnings history  here.

• Videos

Videos royalties represent a bit more than 9% of my multimedia sales. No sales yet to report at Shutterstock, Istock and Revostock.

• Audio

I had my first 2 sales at Pond5 this month with an average of $3.5 per download, a value between photo and video. My files are distributed to 4 agencies so far. Audio represents however  only 1% of my multimedia sales.

For more daily updates, you can follow me on Twitter and  Facebook. Until next month!

You also visit my interactive photo wall made by Cooliris. You can create your own for free also.

February 2010 earnings

Summary

No BME to report in any of the big photo agencies but February was quite good considering it had only 17 business days.  My total earning including photos, videos and sounds and referrals was just above $500. You will  find my detailled earnings per media below:

 

Isyndica Analytics screenshot

• Photos

Microstock photos earnings were up 68% compared to February 2009  with Shutterstock, Istockphoto and Fotolia  taking 71% of the total. Midstock  agencies did ok  with 12% of total photos sales. Stockxpert closed down the 11th of February so I signed up in two new agencies and both accounts are already showing a positive balance offsetting the loss of stockxpert earnings.

The first agency  is Depositphotos (DP) which attracted a lot of attention with their shock and awe  promotion program by paying contributors up to  $100 if they  upload 500 pictures. Apparently this program has been closed down March 1st. Uploading is quite fast despite the fact at least one category has to be selected. Ranking determines the commission rate which is 44% (for non exclusive photographers) and increases to 46% after 500 sales.

The second agency, Graphic Leftovers (GLO), primarily sells vectors but do sell  pictures as well. Upload

process is a breeze as it is  fully integrated in the Isyndica platform via an API : you don't even need to push

your uploads on the site. GLO offers a generous 52% commission to all contributors.

If you want to join these two agencies feel free to use my referral links above:
http://graphicleftovers.com/ref=ldambies/ 
http://submit.depositphotos.com?ref=1007492

• Videos

I had my first sales at AlwaysHD ($25 for one HD1080) and  Pond5($10 for one HD720) and I am still waiting for my first  sales at Revostock, Shutterstock and Istock. It is not much but enough to represent 7% of my total multimedia earnings.

• Audio

No sales to report this month with about 20 files online at Revostock, Pond5 and Audiomicro.

January 2010 earnings

Summary

All multimedia files included (photo,video,audio), january earnings  were just above the $400 mark  with not even a BME  to record. Detailed earnings by categories are reported below:

• Photos

Microstock agencies performed poorly this month, although sales picked up nicely in the last week of the month. Earnings are just 28% higher than those in January 2008 despite having larger portfolios. Shutterstock had a solid  month following by Fotolia and Istock, very close to each others. Small agencies and midstock
agencies did not sell as much as they usually do.

• Videos

I had my second sale at Clipcanvas (141 clips on line) which netted me 42 euros. I am still waiting for my first sale at Pond5 and Shutterstock. Due to a  lengthy review process, I have only 6 videos on line at Istock and no sales to report  despite getting a lot of views (as high as 600 per files....).

• Audio

Like mentioned on my previous post, I just started submitted sound effects to several agencies so it is bit  early to expect sales especially with only 16 files at Pond5.

Isyndica Analytics screenshot

Detailled earnings in US dollars

December 2009 earnings

Photos

December was pretty good considering that sales dried up in the last week of the month and that I do not have any christmas related pictures on my portfolio. I had quite a few extended licence sales at SS, DT and Veer and the latter was also my only BME this month. Sales at 3DStudio made a come back this month after a three months drought.Istock sales took a dip with less than $100 but still managed to be my second best earning agency and the one with the highest RPI. If my total RPI was quite low this month at 0.51, it is worth mentioning that 0.95 was my all time highest $/dl since I started microstock.

Overall, including referral and midstock sales, my december earnings were just above the $450 mark which is a 100% increase over December 2008.


Videos

No sales to report this month and I am still building my portfolio, uploading videos to six agencies although their distribution is far from being even. Clipcanvas is my largest library so far with over 100 videos on line, the other five having less than 50. I am getting a lot of views at Istock with only three clips but reviews are painfully slow.

Isyndica screenshot

Earnings table (US dollars)

2009 goals

As far as my 2009 goals, the main one which was to make $500 a month with microstock pictures was reached once in September and the months after that were also close to this number. some of them will be only be reached sometime in January like the commission increase to $0.36 at SS and the silver rank at Fotolia. I also managed to increase my portfolio to more than 1000 pictures on most agencies but missed my 500 portfolio target at Istock. I had 3 more pictures with flames at IStock as expected. Midstock sales are still a bit lower than I was expected although they represented 20% of my total sales in October 2009.

Submit Footage Clips to Shutterstock and make $$$!

Clipcanvas HD footage marketplace review

In this article I review Clipcanvas, a HD footage marketplace I joined two months ago to distribute my clips. Also in this post, an interview with Cato Salter, CEO of Clipcanvas who was kind enough to answer some of my questions about his company.

Presentation

Clipcanvas is a HD footage and animation marketplace based in Norway founded in 2007. The website site with a black and gold design is fairly quick to load. A large window , on the right hand side of the screen displays continously three different footage every week. Video clips previews use the flash based Flowplayer technology with success: preview window is large (420 by 238 pixels) and the image is crisp and clear making it the best previews I have seen so far on any footage agencies.


How to submit?


You can either run the Clipcanvas uploader application from your desktop or normal ftp software like Filezilla.
The Clipcanvas uploader is pretty straightforward to use: Once logged with your credentials, you just have drag and drop your clips onto a window and click the upload button.
Once submitted, your clip will be placed in the ''tag your clips'' section of the site.The last step is to enter keywords (separated by commas) and minimal informations about the clip such as category,dynamic,handling,camera framing.
Based on my experience, once you have your keywords ready, the final submission does not take more than 30 seconds and if you have a group of similar clips, less than 10 seconds using the available fast tagging. Clipcanvas is by far the easiest and fastest site for your final submission. In addition, clip reviews are very fast, mostly done under 24 hours. I found out that if the Clipcanvas uploader was very slow, uploading using ftp was considerably faster so I will recommend the latter.


Video clips requirements


Clipcanvas accepts clips with a minimum duration of 2 seconds and a maximum size of 750MB in the following formats:DV,DVcam,DVCpro 25/50/100,HDV1,HDV2,Xdcam,Xdcam HD,ProResHQ 10bit,ProRes 8bit, AVC intra (must be delivered in ProResHQ),Cineform, 12bit (must be delivered in ProResHQ),Dnx, DnxHD,Photo.jpg/.mjp 75/100%, Digibeta (export to ProRes or photo.jpg before upload).
I did not have so far any rejections by uploading quicktime movies (motionjpeg 95%) rendering from avchd files.


Interview with Cato Cater, CEO of Clipcanvas

Q: Can you present briefly the business in which Clipcanvas operates?

A: ''We are in a competitive industry comprised of so many professionals with high standards, and it is important to us to do our best to meet the requirements and demands that this implies. This goes for our submitters as well as for our buyers. We deliver video footage to our customers in more than 7 different professional codecs and a total of 20 variations thereof, bringing flexibility to our buyers´ digital workflows. Our primary focus is HD. The main bulk of our customers are working in production and post-production houses, and this list is growing by the day, representing companies and buyers from all over the world''.


Q: What can you tell us about your upcoming developments at Clipcanvas?


A: ''With regards to developments in the future, I would like to say we continuously work on making improvements:
- the referral program is in place and will be available from early January - referrers will earn a flat 10% of sales generated by these referrals for a set period of time for each buying user referred
- we will also offer more advanced affiliate solutions for those that want to integrate more closely with Clipcanvas through an API (will also be available in January). For example, the API would make it possible for any of our submitters to display and offer their own clips for sale through their own webpages (if they have one), but it would require some programming skills (with which we might even help out with in certain cases).
- also we are continuously working to improve the service we offer, based on input from all our users, and some of these improvements take more time while others take less, some you notice and some you don´t. We still have a lot of work to do, we are working hard, and I hope our users appreciate this even if some developments take longer time for us to implement than we would wish for''.
''We market our service and the video content offered through Clipcanvas in many different ways, both online and in more traditional media and communication channels. This is something we will intensify in the upcoming year, as we are now at the point where we pack some punch in the market''.


Conclusion


In summary:

Plus for contributors: Euros zone, video previews, referral program (to start in January 2010), ftp, quick final submission, quick reviews, high commission rate (60%), option to set your own prices (from 50 to 500 euros).
Plus for buyers: billing accounts, live support,free H.264 watermarked previews for testing.
Minuses for contributors: did not find any... but feel free to leave a comment if you find some!

Overall, I found Clipcanvas to be a great marketplace to join and I am looking forward to their new developments in 2010. The number of clips doubled in the last 6 months and Clipcanvas has now a library of just over 50,000 clips. For future reference, Clipcanvas is ranked 157,235 in Alexa.com and below is a 6 months trailing of Clipcanvas traffic compare to some of its competitors.











With a bit more than 100 clips on line I already had my first sale and looking forward to have more. Clipcanvas referral program is not ready yet but feel free to join by clicking the banner below. You can also follow Clipcanvas on twitter or join their fan page on facebook.


Browse my HD clips at Clipcanvas !

November 2009 earnings

Photos

November was on track for a BME until the first half of the month, but the second half was noticeably slower and I ended up finally with a second BME. Only one BME to report at CSP with Istock finishing first, ahead from SS (despite 15 OD sales) and FT. Sales were dissappointing at SXP and DT (with RPD decreasing for the third consecutive month). I am still on the process to upload my entire portfolio at Veer and I am glad to report my first sale there. So overall, my earnings reached almost $600 this month when I include midstock sales and referrals.
A slowdown is expected in December so unless a EL sales spree happens, I will probably keep September in my records as 2009's BME with $508.82.

Video

No sales yet but I managed to increase my portfolio at Pond5 (54) and Clipcanvas (91). I have also 39 clips accepted at Shutterstock, 9 at Revostock, 5 at AlwaysHD and 1 at Istock (this clip was pending for a month in the queue...).One of my clip was on the front page of Clipcanvas for a week but unfortunately it was not sold once :( I noticed that video previews looked much better at Clipcanvas than they do at Pond5...

Update: I just found out that my first HD clip (720p) was sold on Clipcanvas at the end of month. I received for this sale a commission of 30 €. You can see this clip here.

Stay tuned for more blog updates in December and in the meantime, you can read my daily updates on Twitter.

Daily sales graph - Isyndica screenshot

Earnings table (figures in USD)

Submit Footage Clips to Shutterstock and make $$$!

Compilation of HD Stock footage agencies requirements

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.





Submit Footage Clips to Shutterstock and make $$$!