Microstock photography results for May 2008
Another slow month. Earnings down again but still tracking ahead of last year. Interestingly, last year, sales dropped in the period from March to May and then rose month on month all the way through to October. It will be interesting to see if this happens again though it does look line the trend in 2007 was caused by no uploads during the March to May period followed by a couple of big upload sessions.
I could replicate this as I have a few shots ready for upload so it is just a matter of prioritising microstock which I haven't been doing since my big trip (Basically I have too many photos that I am just overwhelmed of where to start). Winter is here now so hopefully I will get some time to do it.
The other thing that is interesting is how different sites do better for no apparent reason. I have done nothing in the past year yet StockXpert had a great month last month and dreamtime had a great month this month. As long as each month a few sites do well, I dont complain if it isn't the same ones.
Below are percentages for the month to show how I have been going:
15% shutterstock
21% dreamtime
9% Fotolia
27% istockphoto
6% bigstockphoto
8% 123RF
14% StockXpert
0% Featurepics
Previous results for 2008:
April 2008 Earnings
March 2008 Earnings
Feb 2008 Earnings
Jan 2008 Earnings
2 comments:
I've been thinking about getting into stock. I work for an ad agency on the marketing side, and our Art Buyer gave me a list of all the stock houses and their specs. From your experience, is it easy, difficult, etc? What are the pros and cons?
Paul,
It is easy to get started at the microstock firms. The thing to watch out for is they expect high quality photos (no noise) so it may take a change to your normal photo processing workflow.
As far as pros and cons go, you have to figure out whether the time you put in is worth it. You put in a lot of effort upfront getting your photos online, yet the benefit gets drip feed in over the years.
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