RPI (Return Per Image) going down down :(

I recently had a look at my RPI (return per image) from January 2008 till January 2009.
RPI is calculated for each agency by divided total earning by the number on pictures of the portfolio at the end of the month (EL included, referrals excluded).

Cumulative RPI is calculated by adding the RPI of each microstock agency namely SS,IS,FT,123RF,DT,SXP,CSP,SCP,LO,BSP,CT so a total of 10 agencies to which I contributed during the period.

By looking at the graph, it is pretty obvious that despite the increase in commission granted by the main agencies to their contributors, RPI went up and down during the past year band took a hit in October 2008. My RPI was the highest in May 2008 (my BME) with a value of 1.11 and reach its lowest point in December 2008 with only 0.38.

In other words, upload new pictures does not produce any more increase in earnings.....

1 year evolution of cumulative RPI and commission per download (Jan 2008 - Jan 2009)

So how to increase RPI in microstock ???

• Join new agencies, a 0.01 bump in RPI is always welcome, but this is debatable.... CSP has contributed 0 to my RPI for a while now....
• The first option to increase artificially is deleting the non selling pictures on each agency. Once again you never know when a picture sells especially with a EL, RPI can go up quite a lot in this case.
  
• Produce more sellable pictures by finding a niche for sure will increase RPI over time, might take a while though....
• Focus more on quality than quantity....
• Another option is to increase the value of some pictures by analyzing past year sales and putting them as exclusives at FT or DT. I just did that for two of my best sellers in DT.
• Other way to increase the value of a picture is to upload the high res size but in agencies with sub and credit it is again debatable.

These points made it will be interesting to look at the evolution of the RPI in 2009, hopefully it will stabilize somewhere around 0.5!!

Feel free to comment, I would like to hear about your RPI figures !

Metrics to track your portfolio performance. A look at Shutterstock

The aim of using metrics is to monitor the performance of your portfolio month after month. Financial metrics are not the only ones to measure performance but non-financial ones can also help making decision about your photo production.

The obvious financial metric we all use is the total monthly revenue. Some photographers are looking at $/download and return per image (RPI). Each metric can give indication about how your pictures are performing on each agency.

To be able to use these metrics at the end of the month, you should compare them to targets you have set target at the beginning for example total monthy revenue and RPI to reach. $/dl is mostly useful for credit based agencies like FT,123RF,SXP (even if they do sub), does not bring anything for SS which will be $ 0.33/dl in my case if did not have EL.

RPI is a very useful metric to measure how your pictures are selling at a particular agency. Based on my portfolio (no people pictures, no vectors) my targets for RPI at SS are the following:

• RPI> $ 0.50 excellent
• RPI between $ 0.25 and $ 0.5 average to good
• RPI< $ 0.25 poor

The problem with RPI is that it a metrics related to new and old pictures from the portfolio. Anyway, I propose a modified RPI which I call batchRPI which like it says is related to your monthly batch. It is a direct indication of the quality of your batch and it can give also indirectly indication about the lifespan of the batch: the idea here is that if you maximize bRPI, you are lickely to see the benefits even the following month. Also , these pictures are likely to sell well on other sites like IS,123RF,DT,FT on the longer term.

How to calculate batchRPI ?

First evaluate the size of your batch accepted at SS: from the main page, click on waiting to be reviewed . Then on status of submitted photos click on the approved photos tab and count day by day.

Then the painful one... From the downloads stats open each day stat and count how did you earn for the batch.

bRPI = batch earnings/batch size

The way how SS works is that newly uploaded pictures sold straight away with more or less success then sell occasionally in the following months. Following this logic, a good bRPI in May is likely to have positive impact on the RPI in June.


Some graphs !

• bRPI March 2007
  

Initial bRPI was 1.14 which is average and represented 34 % of total earnings this month. Interestingly, this batch managed to kept his value in April with a bRPI=0.92. In June, however bRPI went down and will represent only 2% of the earnings....

• bRPI May 2007
  

This batch had a very good initial value with bRPI=2.08. It was a batch of 45 pictures which earned 2.08*45=$ 93.6 (73% of earnings!). Will this batch hold his value or not? So far I saw I bRPI in June was divided by more than 2.







------------------

bRPI> 1 : very good to excellent (new pictures made at least $ 1 in average)
bRPI between 0.33 and 1 : average
bRPI = 0.33 (new pictures sold only once in average)
bRPI<0.33>

SXP May 2008: bRPI= 0.26 (63% of earnings coming from new pictures!), RPI = 0.10

Enough for financial measures, the two non financial metrics I will follow will be the monthly acceptance rates at SS and IS. Looking at the other acceptance rates in their other will not bring much since they are too high or too fluctuating. As it is not useful to measure too many things I will discard as metric the sell through rate (STR) which does not say much about month to month performance.

123RF review

I started submitting to 123RF in July 2007 along with other agencies. I don't have any link with 123RF (except the referral link at the end :) ) I just wanted to give a fair review of this agency and talk a bit about my experience so far.

Even if sales started very slowly at first, 123RF has been growing at its own pace very consistently as I uploaded regularly every month between 40 and 50 pictures. At this date I am seasoned contributor with a bit more than 500 pictures online. I had 2 payouts (took me 8 months for the first, only 2 months for the second). For the past two months 123RF was my 5th and 3rd site in term of earnings.

I tried to put a list of things I like about 123RF which is actually surprisingly long !

• Consistent and fast reviews (typically 24 to 48 hours)
• Nice and quick web interface with very low downtime
• Easy uploads , no categories and disambiguation needed
• One of the highest acceptance in microstock (at least for me about 80-90%)
• Movable watermark
• 50 % commission
• Possibility to mark as favorites 5 % of your pictures, giving them more exposure during the search
• Automatic Paypal payment after $ 50 reached
• Balanced credit and subscription models in term of sales
• Highest exclusive license commission in all microstock agencies (up to $ 36.50).
• Very fast on line support (used it once)

What I don't like ? Well not many things so far except the donated images I tried it several times which did not increase significantly my sales. However I noticed that fave your best pictures really increase picture exposure and sales. I advice to rotate pictures in the faved section from time to time.

On the graph below I plotted my earning since the start. Please noted that this month is exceptionally high since I sold two extended licenses in a row :)

Is 123RF the little agency that grows and grows ? Time will tell but they have been pretty innovative so far and active in marketing their products. They unveiled recently a new label called EVO, limited so far to some cherry picked contributors. With this, 123RF expands its products to the midstock market.

If you are already submitting to microstock and looking to increase your earnings with a agency with some potential I definitely recommend 123RF. You will need to put at least 200 pictures online to see some earnings though.
And if this post has been useful to you and I convinced you to register you can use my referral link below, you will be my first :) Thanks !

Update on Shutterstock

I wanted to give an update on my progress on Shutterstock : 4 months have passed since my previous post so what happened ?


Stats

• I got a raise from 0.25 to 0.30 then $ 0.33 per download
  
• Best day with 34 downloads in December 2007
• Only 8 pictures so far have made more than $ 10 each (a bit less than 3 % of my portfolio)
  
• At this day 2200 pictures were sold including 2 extended licenses (for $ 20 each)
• Portfolio is now close to 300 pictures
  

• Despite regular uploads, sales are not linear anymore with the size of my portfolio since last December
• The performance of my portfolio decreased steadily from 53 % last January to less than 30 % last month
• SS was my number earner for 8 consecutive months and only second last month after FT
• The raise in March did not change anything :( so I am looking forward to raise this month....
  

It will be interesting to see how much SS are willing to give to their contributors for the raise and how the subscription program that IS will implement later this month will impact on my SS and IS sales. Will SS be number one again next month ? We will see...
Update graphs are below

Despite the pessimist tone of this post, it is still worth to join Shutterstock. If you want to join here is my referral link Submit Photos to Shutterstock and make $$$!
Thanks !

Experiment 8 : Your photos in action, how to find them?

After selling hundred and thousands of pictures, it is always gratifying to see where and how they have been used but you will be able to find only a tiny fraction of them....

Your microstock pictures can be found in a number of media: website, magazine, leaflet, brochure, mugs, mouse pad, billboards or even TV commercials....
Only Fotolia so far, allows you to know the company or individual who bought your picture. The next step is then after few days or weeks to do a search on google with some luck find your photo in action.
The other option is google search your full name between commas, or your porfolio's nickname. If you are lucky enough, buyer can contact you or you got informed by another stock photographer via a forum. Recently, a group called "your photos in use" was created on facebook, you can have a look here.
If you are even luckier, you can stumble on your picture on line (it happened to me once) or on a magazine.

Here are my tear sheets so far, find with a Google search and random browsing. I will update this post if I found more of them.

Bought most probably on Fotolia. Found by Google Search



Bought by Mostphotos ! Found after random browsing....


Web links found with Google:


http://www.addlarose.com/content/blogsection/5/80/


http://www.epuzzle.info/warsaw_skyline

http://www.wday.ru/cekc/psycho/_article/vesennee-obostrenie-ulichnyh-izvrashencev/

http://goeasteurope.about.com/od/poland/tp/mustseewarsaw.htm

http://www.niezalezna.pl/index.php/article/show/id/1507

http://www.motorradwallpaper.de/motorrad_info/Fahrertipps/Helmabnahme_nach_einem_Unfall.php


http://www.fathermag.com/907/light/

http://www.bbcgreen.com/Travel/European-Holidays/Europe-by-train/Poland/Travel/European-Holidays/Warsaw-itinerary

http://www.apoverlag.at/DieApotheke/2008/07/seiten/haupt02_schlaganfall_0807.html

http://www.luft-zum-leben.de/lzl/content/aktiv_leben/umwelt/themenarchiv_umwelt/asthma_und_ozon/index_ger.html


http://www.catholicgreetings.org/Create.asp?card=926



http://backandneck.about.com/b/2008/12/17/scoliosis-stapling.htm

http://www.ehow.com/about_5050252_word-organic-mean.html


Thanks to TinEye

Fourth of July Sizzlers

Vitamin D Deficiency Symptoms

Personal milestone: 1000 photos sold on Shutterstock

Although I joined Shutterstock last year, I only started uploading 5 months ago and just reached this month my 1000^th download.

Having earned $ 260 so far, it means also that I am only $ 240 short of the 20 % raise. Despite the fact that SS is the site with a lowest price per picture ($ 0.25) of all the microstock agencies I contribute, it is the biggest earner every month due to the high volume of sales.The two graphs below plots different parameters over the 5 month period: portfolio size, DL/UP ratio, performance, total earning.

After the first month, a perfect linear correlation is observed between the size of the portfolio and earnings (graph 1). Performance went down after the first month but it is slowly rising to the initial level (graph 2). Performance averages 50 % over five months which means that each picture of portfolio earns $ 0.50 every month. It is quite good but some contributors can reach $ 1 or more. The way to maintain or increase this number is to keep uploading small batches of pictures regularly and having from time to time a best seller. New uploads are usually downloaded the first day being on line then downloads slowly or quickly decline.

The ratio download to upload ratio increases steadily and is currently above 6 which is the highest of all sites. At the time of writing I calculated that 90 % of the portfolio was sold which is far higher than all the other agencies (top 10 pictures take 25 % of the total earnings).

It will be good to know at what size if any a portfolio is sustainable i.e generate a stable amount of money without uploading any new pictures. Some contributors are reporting what indeed revenues are falling with no uploads but a performance of $ 0.25 per picture should be realistic.

But it is time to resume uploading and work on the 2000 target….

Graph 1: Evolution of earnings with the size of porfolio

Graph 2: Evolution of performance and ratio uploads/downloads

Selected frontpage screenshots