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.

Experiment 9 : find your pictures on line with Amazon.com

In a previous post, I was talking about several ways to find your pictures in action. I recently found few of my microstock images on Amazon.com, mainly in books published along with their credits.

What you have to do is perform a search on books using your first name and last name as keywords and you might get some relevants hits. If you have a Amazon account, you can take a peek inside the book and do a second search to land on the credits page: putting the page number as keyword will hopefully bring you to the page with your image,. You just have then to do a printscreen et voila!
My published pictures I found so far were purchased from Istock and Dreamstime and it was interesting to see in what context these pictures were used, always unexpected. Copernicus statue was taken in Warsaw Poland in 2007, offices building in battery park Manhattan in 2001 if I remember correctly. Religious mural in the Shrine of Lourdes in 2007. Cat scratching on the wall in 2008.