Probably Due To Network Congestion

The tables below shows current earnings on a per-site basis giving accurate daily and monthly averages, images sold, online totals and length of time being a member.

Current Royalty Free stock earnings for each site.

Sales and Images online totals.

The total length of time in days that I have been submitting images to the sites.

My current league table is as follows:

1. Shutterstock – for sheer volume of sales
2. iStockphoto – my current favourite, though longest running, earner
3. Dreamstime – surely this place is going to be nipping at the heals of istock soon
4. Fotolia – is getting better and more reliable earner, quite possibly the best for referral earnings too
5. StockXpert – steady earner, great upload features
6. BigStockPhoto – Slow trickle
7. 123RF – an equally slow trickle but showing more promise due to the length of time I’ve been submitting
8. CanStockPhoto – drip…….. drip……………… drip………………. Obviously not a place where my images sell! Nice place, shame about the lack of sales

🙂

Its time for another royalty free stock image update covering iStockphoto (iStock), CanStockPhoto (CSP), BigStockPhoto (BSP), Fotolia, Dreamstime, Shutterstock, StockXpert (SXP), and 123RF.
I’ve been working out some very accurate averages for selling my Royalty Free Stock on the various sites, its all to do with this and this 1 year = 365.242199 days which is a pretty accurate length of a year. The amount of time I’ve spent playing with a spread sheet and figuring out how to do what i wanted to do! 😀 Its passed the time.
As you can Clearly see Shutterstock is in the lead by a long way giving almost half of my stock earnings followed by iStock and Dreamstime. I must say Dreamstime is becoming more and more consistant lately and will be giving iStock a run for its money!

🙂

Here’s some more information for the Photographer wanting to get into Royalty Free Stock market selling, i’ve been doing a little more playing with my spreadsheet and have worked out some averages for each of the listed sites below, check the Pie Chart to see which RF Stock seller makes the most:

• 123RF
• Canstock
• Bigstock
• StockXpert
• Fotolia
• Dreamstime
• istockphoto
• Shutterstock

Its quite a shift in Pie since my last little chart which only showed my total earnings sliced up across the 8 different sites.
I wish I had listened and started up at Shutterstock to begin with, for the simple speed of sales and amounts which far out-weigh any of the other sites. Here’s the actual numbers too: (see Key below for more info) *You may have to open the image in another window or save it to your computer as this blog chops some of it off*

Key:
Numbers = total images sold per site
$ / Image = Average earnings per image sold

iStockphoto, CanStockPhoto, BigStockPhoto, Dreamstime, StockXpert, Fotolia, Shutterstock, 123RF – A Microstock Update.

This is my little micropayment stock update:
In the screen grab picture below you can see whats going on in my little Royalty Free Stock Image world, the biggest cheese is still iStockphoto, but coming on close behind is Shutterstock.
Stockxpert is still the best average payout per image followed by Fotolia and then Dreamstime, Shutterstock being the lowest payout per image, but it makes up for it in amount of sales.
In order of slowness of sales (slowest first):

• 123RF (just getting the portfolio online, so its still testing really!)
• Canstock
• Bigstock
• StockXpert
• Fotolia
• Dreamstime
• istockphoto
• Shutterstock

I’d say I get a steady trickle of sales from iStock and Shutterstock, though Shutterstock is better when you are consistantly putting up new work, iStock ticks over by its self better (money wise).
Referrals at Shutterstock are starting to show a few $$ here and there, a little from Dreamstime, and a little from Fotolia too, everywhere else is, so far, non-existant! (So click the blooming links and sign up Grrr! Ha ha ha)

I’m just trying out www.123rf.com so thats probably why I have no sales yet, I’ll give it time and it will take me a while to get all my stock images online.
I’ve kicked Gimmiestock out altogether, nothing ever sold, the site has a slow review time and a painfull system of uploading images.

If you are looking for ease of upload, go for StockXpert, it has to be the most user / Photographer Friendly of the bunch, being able to set image properties to groups of images at the same time is a total time saver.
Istock might well be one of the worst sites for uploading, but if you use one of the image manager programs they offer it can streamline your workflow there.

Advice is to always keyword and caption your files off-line in Adobe Bridge (or other image management program that supports embeded data).

If you are after Free Royalty Free Shots for your designing pleasure, Fotolia and Dreamstime would be my recommendations as they always have fresh images for you to grab, just click one of my links and sign up 😉