Recent Sales, 7/28

One of my old, and silly, shots had a sale today at Shutterstock. This is a just a simple close up of a lampshade, taken in a hotel room, way back in August 2007:

I was taking shots around the hotel room, decided to try this, and lo and behod, it was accepted!! And has continued to have the occasional sale! This silly little shot is in my Top 20 at SS, in terms of number of sales. I also made a version with the color shifted to blue, and it has some sales also. And those hotel room shots have been strong performers for me overall. Go figure!

  ¶ 11:12 0 Comments

  Microstock Photography - June 2008 Graphics Yes, I'm an engineer. And that means I keep statistics. Here's a couple of graphs showing recent microstock performance. Now if I could just figure out what they MEAN.....


Above graph is total $$ sales per month, all sites combined. The red line is the 12-month rolling average trendline. Overall sales are pretty even, which is not too bad considering how little effort I've put into microstock over the past 6 months.

  ¶ 08:59 0 Comments

  ShutterStock - Where Do the Dollars Come From? I did a quick analysis of earnings from ShutterSTock over the past 2.25 years:


Clearly, the bulk of earnings come in drips and drops, those tiny "25 a Day" sales (which used to be $0.25 per image, but now are $0.33). I've only had a couple of Enhanced sales, but they add up quickly (at $28.00 per). The On Demand sales are kind of new, it will be interesting to see how much they increase in ratio with time...

Not sure how other, more dedicated, microstockers measure up, but I'm going to ask at the Yahoo group...  ¶ 09:23 0 Comments

  Microstock Sales - $/image All sites, combined:

  ¶ 14:26 0 Comments

  Microstock Sales This is a graph of my overall sales in microstock since I started, I February 2007.


  ¶ 12:24 0 Comments

  Back In the Game

  ¶ 15:10 0 Comments

  Found Photo One of the disappointing things about microstock is that we seldom know where are images end up, or what they're being used for. But every once in a while we find one. I was recently doing some poking around, using a little program called Tin-Eye, and I discovered one of my images being used as a book cover!

I don't know for sure, but I think the image was bought from iStockPhotos. Possibly from Shutterstock:, the image is available at both places. Here's the original:

  ¶ 13:32 0 Comments

  More of StockXpert


  ¶ 11:15 0 Comments

  Stockxpert Yep, I recently joined yet another microstock site. Stockxpert was recommended by several folks I know from one of the Yahoo groups I'm in, and I figured to give it a shot. I've been building my portfolio 5 images at a time, starting with images aleadey approved at other sites. No sales yet, but it has only been a couple of days.

This shot is from under the Rt. 19 bridge crossing the New River gorge, in WV. It hasn't been a big seller, but I still like it!

  ¶ 09:17 0 Comments

  Down The Drain? One of the first sites I was with was iStock. Over my 18 months at microstock, it has been a strong overall performer, generally #2. BUT... for a while it was growing great, even challenged to be my top site a few months. Then it seemed to reverse, and lately has been drifting closer towards #3. Dumping monthly sales data into a spreadsheet confirms my perception.

This graph shows $/month, with a 6th order polynomial trendline for reference. Pretty ugly. But why? Well, not to be paranoid, but they've been putting a big push towards getting contributors to become exclusive, to submit only to them. Part of that push includes things like limiting uploads from non-exclusives, different review process for exclusives, and skewing their search engines to show images from exclusives first, giving them more visability.

  ¶ 10:07 1 Comments