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!

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.

I have 6 sites where I'm "active". One of the things I track is what percent of business comes from the two biggies, compared to all the rest. In a perfect world, I'd like to see somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of my businees coming from the others. Not sure why, but that's what I'd like to see.

Anyway: Sales breakdown for June:
IS: 38.9% of sales
SS: 32.3% of sales
SX: 7.3% of sales (tie)
123RF: 7.3% of sales (tie)
FT: 7.3% of sales (tie)
DT: 6.8% of sales

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...

Microstock Sales - $/image

All sites, combined:

Just looking at StockXpert:

Microstock Sales

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