November 2010 earnings

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Highlights

Earnings show a slowdown from previous month although the big4  are still holding with respectable earnings. No video sales to report so royalties are split between photo (97%) and audio (3%).

Reporting by media

•     Photo

Once again Shutterstock takes the first place with plenty of OD sales. Not too far behind is Fotolia with a new BME and third  Dreamstime only few dollars away from a BME thanks to a special 100% royalty day. Although earnings for the  big4 photo are growing, Istock is 300% down compared to last year.

•     Video

No sales this month which is a  first for this year.

•     Audio

Audio sales represent a  bit more  than 3% of total earnings with  most sales coming from Pond5.

As usual, stay tuned for more blog updates in December  and in the meantime, you can follow my  updates on Twitter. You can also join my facebook photo page here.

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 $$$!

December 2008 earnings

Highlights

As expected, a slow month in microstock especially during the second half of the month .Looking at the yearly graph, earnings dropped from September despite adding new pictures which is the opposite of last year. Compared to december 2007 most agencies are down also.
This month is the 2nd worst month of the year for earnings, the lowest RPI and $/dl with just below $ 200 for microstock. Quite unusual month as I did not have BME in the big 6 this month. No help from extended sales but a sale a panthermedia brings total earnings to almost $220. I also had my first payout there. Shutterstock was the only agency not be affected this month. I definitely looking forward to january to see an increase in downloads!

Compared to December 2007 in ():

Total earnings: $ 192.47 ($ 163.46)
Pictures sold: 383 (446)
Average $/dl: 0.50 (0.37)
Global RPI : 0.38 (0.90)

• Shutterstock. A pretty good month considering the slow down at the end of the year, SS takes almost 50% of the earnings this month. As last, I sold less pictures this december than the one last year but because of the higher commission earnings are few dollars up. On demand sales made up for 5 % of the earnings.RPI=0.16.
• Istockphoto. Very similar to last mont with RPI of 0.11 hopefully IS will pick up again next month. Got my first sub sale there for $ 0.19.
  
• Fotolia. A big drop compared to the last two months at Fotolia. Very RPI at 0.02
• Dreamstime. A bit slower than last month. RPI 0.02.
• Stockxpert. A decrease compared to last month despite my first ppd sales of $ 7.5 via photos.com. RPI of 0.02
• Bigstockphoto . Not bad considering the performance of other stocks. RPI 0.01

CT had a BME but still under 2 % of total earning. I tried to resume my uploading but got 100% rejection! I think I will just for my first payout there !
Less than 1%: SCP,CSP


Stats

For the first time, I include this month stats provided by Lookstat that I joined recently. At the moment it allows to track the stats of SS,DT and IS. I had Rahul Pathak , CEO of Lookstats,on the phone recently to give him some feedback. Exciting developments are on the way, the ultimate goal being to move away to the classical Excel spreadsheet. Some features like tracking earning by keywords across agencies would a powerful tool since it very difficult or impossible to do that manually . FT will be added next as well as more flexiblity about the date periods selection.

November 2008 earnings

Highlights

I was complaining about last month but November was worse for me with less than $ 250 sales for Microstock. However, one sale at Yaymicro (5 euros), one at Panthermedia ($19.3), one at Zymmetrical ($21) plus referrals push this month earnings to $ 285. Global RPI sunk to 0.46 and average $/dl was 0.59.

Compared to November 2007 in ():

Total earnings: $ 233.57 ($ 143.9)
Pictures sold: 396 (377)
Average $/dl: 0.59 (0.38)
Global RPI : 0.46 (0.93)

Microstock one by one

• Shutterstock. By far number 1 again despite a pretty bad 1st half of the month. For the time for a while, just below the $ 100 mark this month Like last month I had four on demand sales taking 8 % of the earnings. A good split between old and new files regarding downloads which is good. My lowest RPI ever this month at 0.16... I sold more pictures than last year at the same time but because of higher commission now I actually earned more.
  

• Fotolia. Similar number than last month with a nice EL

• Istockphoto. Lost its solid second place. Earnings went down for the second consecutive month and I am back to money I was making at the beginning of the year.
  

• Stockxpert. I decided finally to opt-in in an attempt to get some pay par dl's sales at photos.com. It did not happened yet, but I had quite a lot of sub from Jupiter image.

• Dreamstime. Pretty slow month, a lot of sub sales which explains the low number this month
  

• Bigstockphoto. BME by one dollar this month. I managed to have 500+ photos on line now.

• 123RF. Very dissapointing month, sales came to a halt. It is actually my year Worst Month !
  

Less than 1%: Crestock (BME),Scanstockphoto,Canstockphoto (no sales).

November earnings

Highlights

A slight improvement (+15 %) over last month despite few holidays in US and Europe. All major sites had their BME except FT and DT. I started also submitting pictures to two upcoming midstock sites: mostphotos and symmetrical and was accepted on the Photoshelter collection a macrostock agency. A few words about MP and ZM below, I will go back to PS in another post:

Based in Sweden and described itself as “the most democratic photosite ever”, Mostphotos does not review the pictures. Prices at fixed at 25 euros and photographers get 50 %. There is no uploads limit and up to three pictures can be sent by http pretty quickly with automatic IPTC reading (ftp is available as well). People can vote for pictures and competitions are organized.
Some photographers @ microstockgroup have reported sales lately. It is certainly interesting to get paid in Euros for a change…. If you want to have a try at mostphotos you can click here


Zymmetrical is another midstock agency with a pretty sophisticated multilingual platform. Photographers can set their own prices from $ 3 to $100 for the largest size and get a generous 70 % royalty fee. Up to 5 pictures can be submitted by http with a minimum size of 640 pixels. Zipped pictures can be sent by ftp as well. Some photographers @ microstockgroup have also reported some sales. If you want to visit zymmetrical please click on the banner below:



Worth mentioning also, a new version of Prostockmaster is available this month which now includes Stockxpert and Alamy (123RF works again as well). Trial version allows to upload up to 5 pictures a day to 10 sites. It can be downloaded here. Note that for SXP, your password has to have less than 10 characters for PSM to work properly.


Microstock one by one

• SS (+50%) BME. Clear winner once again taking a bit less than 50 % of earnings and another BME due probably to regular uploads all through the month. Performance is up compared to last month with 50 % (0.50 c per picture of the portfolio). It has also the highest downloads to uploads ratio of all sites with 5.27.
  
• FT (-16%) Second again this month but despite uploading new pictures earnings went down and performance is only 7 % this month. It is the largest portfolio with quite a lot of exclusive pictures that is why FT can maintain its position. Like previous month an average of a bit more than $ 1 per picture sold. I have serious doubts about the search engine and some bugs from V2 are still there…. On the good side, rankings are working again.
  
• IS (+54%) BME. It is always quite difficult to get pictures accepted there but performance is up this month to 21 % just after SS. Second also on the UP/DL with a value of 0.86
  
• 123RF (+78%) BME. For the first time, 123RF did better than DT and got another BME. Performance is still low (3%) but sales are more frequent right now.
  
• DT (-43%) Sales went down quite a lot this month. Global performance went down from 6 to 3%. Acceptance ratio: 64 %.
  
• SXP (+15%) BME. Sales are progressing this month with some credit sales and two subscription sales. Reviews are still a bit lengthy but I think it worth staying there. Same performance than DT but gets two times & per download.
  
• CT (+500%) BME. Less then 2 % of earnings but few sales this month made a BME. 100 + portfolio this month. They lowered the minimum payout form 100 to $50.

• The others... I was surprised to get two sales at CSP (I do not upload there anymore). LO Piggy bank is stuck at $2.40: no sales this month despite a portfolio of almost 300 pictures. A new platform is up, we will see what happens in the next coming weeks. BSP still dead as well as SV and FP.
  

Miscellaneous stats

• 377 pictures sold (277 on SS)
• Days without sales: 0
• Best day: $ 10.875 (21/11)
• Most pictures sold in one day: 31
• Top seller made $ 5.75

Detailed earnings

Figures in USD. Note: 100 % global performance is defined by a portfolio with an average of sales of $ 1 per picture. Ratio DL/IS is the ratio of all the time downloads over the total pictures of portfolio

% earning for each microstocks

Best seller november $ 5.75 (SS, new upload)

What's next ?

Investigate few midstock sites and resubmit some pictures on SS and IS. Also work toward the $ 100 a month on SS.