Probably Due To Network Congestion

Posts Tagged ‘shutterstock

Here is my all-time top-5 run-down… (I’ve had a massive stock break, not uploaded anything in about 2 years! *which also means I’ve been brewing for 2 years!)
This shows which my consistent sellers are at the main stock sites. (Grunge ahoy!)

iStockphoto

In at number one is ‘Black Photocopy background Texture’ selling 164 times, 5093 and earning $268.68

At number two is ‘Coffee Cup coaster ring stains’ selling 119 times,  4092 views and earning $119.06

At number three is ‘CT Scan Skull Slices’ selling 116 times, 25345 views and earning $59.52

At number four is ‘Acorns from an Oak tree’ selling 111 times, 4388 views and earning $131.53

At number five is ‘Paper Airplane’ selling 97 times, 5494 views, and earning $177.12

Dreamstime

In at number one is ‘Canvas texture Element’ selling 49 times, 1900 vies and earning $60.32
Canvas Texture Element
At number two is ‘Cup Stains Set’ selling 48 times, 2138 views and earning $58.92
Cup Stains Set
At number three is ‘Photocopy Texture Element’ selling 39 times, 2150 views and earning $80.29
Photocopy Texture Element
At number four is ‘Paper Airplane’ selling 35 times, 54239 views and earning $59.89
Paper Airplane
At number five is ‘Cup Stains set’ selling 33 times, 1342 views and earning $41.13
Cup Stains Set

I’d do Shutterstock & Fotolia too but they don’t give image specific stats, I could do Fotolia sales and views but it doesn’t show the image earnings.
You can sort by ‘downloads’ at my Fotolia Portfolio to see the current sales & view stats and see the most popular downloads from my Shutterstock Portfolio.

Here’s the Lookstat graph for February ’09, Shutterstock, Dreamstime, and iStockphoto:february09-earnings

As far as actual banked payouts go, I’ve cashed out $304.95 with a $100 pending payment from iStockphoto, I think their new payout schedule has slowed down the cash-out procedure… Annoyingly this makes my payments graph miss out iStock for the first month since July ’07 though next month with look nice for it!

iStockphoto, no real surprises just steady away iStock are accepting way more than Shutterstock or Fotolia at present, I’ve had my second batch of Dollar Bin notifications from iStock… Fingers crossed that their second chance sells a few.

Fotolia was interesting with its 2 email updates, its nice to be told about changes so hopefully they are learning that its good to keep their contributors up to date in a timely manner… I would say ‘an accurate and timely’ manner but the details of their update were, and some still are, a little sketchy/ misunderstood/ lacking real insight into how Sales will work in their Free API etc. I think their second email pretty much sorted out the Fotolia Exclusivity 🙂 Sales here have been picking up this month and I’m due to turn Silver status very soon 🙂
Regarding the Free API, I added around 80 images to it and made an initial 40 Credits to my balance, I’d think that Zero-Selling old files going for free won’t effect my regular sales and would act as some extended marketing possibilities, though I’ll believe it when I see it 😉

Shutterstock reject 102 out of a 103 batch… the very same batch has been fully accepted at Stockxpert (also selling) & Canstockphoto, with BigStockPhoto and 123RF have accepted the bulk of this batch, iStock are still accepting-rejecting-and-selling images out of this batch uploading takes longer at iStock with their 20/week limit, Dreamstime accepting a good portion of them too.
The 1 image accepted at Shutterstock and the 102 rejects were questioned with support and I was given the chance to re-upload about 3 more shots… but quite frankly its not worth the hassle of looking through the files and uploading again… their loss!

Dreamstime is a steady ticker, credit and subscription sales are always good and new referrals every week is no bad thing… other than the review-queue limits recently I have no problems with Dreamstime. Things are pretty fair and clear, new files sell, old files sell, their referral links on each and every image are really handy for bloggers and personal websites, generally a fair image review process that give files a good chance, their Image ranking system that increases the price / payout for good selling images works a treat without devaluing your work.

123RF has been picking up after a slow start to the year, no problems here either.

Stockxpert is as consistent as ever, only issues being their lack of answering forum questions and their old referral system that is still broken on the stats page.

Canstock, BigStock, Crestock… nothing much to report… fingers crossed Canstockphoto is getting better with their new beta portfolio section, worthy of the upload time, and just checking now another nice $19.80 Fotosearch regular sale 🙂

Mostphotos, Yaymicro… nothing… no report… no action… no sales… (sorry guys… but its true!)

And last but not least, *chuckle* I had a massive payout from SnapVillage…. $0.30 with no PayPal fees! Wow!! I’ll be looking forward to a Veer Marketplace invite or copy-over or something 😉

January’s been pretty good, a couple of nice surprises in the form of a $100 referral and $25 Extended license at Dreamstime, and January as a whole feels to have been a busy sales month.
CanStockPhoto has had some Fotosearch sales, one nice ‘Fotosearch regular sale’ brought in $19.80 and a trickle of subs sales from Fotosearch… looking more promising that CSP has for ages! (ever before!)

I’ve actually managed some uploading, and I’m still at it, I’m going to have to do some overnight (un-metered) uploading or I’m going to bust out of my ISP’s 15Gig/month limit an I’ll start getting charged more (£1/Gigabyte).
Considering that I’ve got myself a new project, of Beer brewing, I’ve done quite well with the keywording and editing this month, I have a batch of 103 waiting to go up to a couple more of the sites and lots of already approved images at Stockxpert though iStock have rejected quite a few of the first 20. Also I have another batch of 28 which is edited, keyworded and ready to go, iStock is going to take a while at 20/week in the queue and I notice that Dreamstime has set a 25/day limit on adding to the inspection queue too.

I’ve stopped uploading to Mostphotos and YaY Micro for the moment as its going to be counter-productive if nothing actually sells there!

Here’s the Lookstat graph:
jan2009-lookstats
Lookstat’s new feature is pretty cool, its an image specific stats function that lets you drill down through an individual file and check out its sales over time. Obviously this is only across iStock, Shutterstock and Dreamstime at the moment but from what I read over at their blog we’ll soon have Fotolia too… Quite an exciting prospect being able to cross-reference the sales of a particular file on all these sites and see their true full earnings, fingers crossed for Stockxpert next 😉

All-time earnings averages pie chart:
all-time-averages-a-month
The Leader board looks like this:

  1. iStockphoto
  2. Shutterstock
  3. Dreamstime
  4. Fotolia
  5. StockXpert
  6. 123RF
  7. BigStockPhoto
  8. CanStockPhoto
  9. Crestock

Dreamstime just edging ahead of Fotolia, which is probably due to good referrals and an Extended License sale at Dreamstime and the exact opposite at Fotolia.

All in all I have cashed-out $483.30 in January, which is above my current average of $401.65, not a bad first month to say we are in this (bogus) Recession!

We would be creeping out of recession if people would just start to spend again, so come on folks go buy the thing you were thinking of buying but just holding off to wait and see what the financial climate does. Spend wisely and save, but remember to spend, pay off those debts too!
Though I do like the USD-GPB exchange rate at present, watching the exchange rates can net you a few extra monetary units in PayPal with a bit of balance swapping or cashing out 😉

logo
December ’08 Microstock Stock Stats, this time using Lookstat.com

lookstat-dec-08-stats

Current supported sites are iStockphoto, Dreamstime & Shutterstock, with Fotolia, 123rf & Stockxpert to follow.
December has been a slow month for sales with the only real event being an Extended license sale at Dreamstime, iStock worked hardest and Shutterstock sold most but made less money! I’ve been pretty slack with uploading, editing, and keywording for a good part of this year maybe I should make a new years resolution to get my finger out! 😉 Lately I’ve had computer problems and had to upgrade spending over £500 on Mobo, CPU, RAM & PSU (Acronym city!!!) and I’ve spent a good bit of time on my really old PC and installed ubuntu and had a good play around in Linux for the first time… *Maybe this is the way computer operating systems ‘should‘ work, its been enjoyable finding that almost everything I need is contained within the Ubuntu environment, albeit running on a slow-as-old-AMD Athlon system. I’d encourage anyone who uses a computer for general stuff to concider installing Ubuntu linux.

Back to Stock, here’s the Lockstat view of my stock History on the current three sites:
lookstat-stats-to-date
No referral earnings will be in these numbers (Adding my referral earnings to these stats would bumb them up quite a bit).

As for features I’d like to see in Lookstat:

  • Track an individual files’ sales history
  • Show the Sell Through rates for each site
  • Average Monthly figure for each site
  • Specify an exact date period to show stats
  • Further site additions of Canstockphoto, Crestock & Bigstockphoto

Now, the question… “Would I pay for this Service” ?

Not sure, it is interesting to see whish files sell the best, but for the most part I find it easy to keep my own little spreadsheet to keep track of my sales and site stats. If I was to pay for it, the amount would have to be low enough so as to be offset by an hour of my time earch month with my own spreadsheet.

My first ‘On Demand’ sale at shutterstock looks promising at $2.48 for 1 sale, much better than the original subscription payout level I’m on of $0.33 per sale 🙂 Lets hope for more of these 🙂
Shutterstock could claw back some potential buyers that might have been defecting to istockphoto with this, and its going to keep the photographers happy too. 🙂

Description:
Coffee cup stains, a range of cups and other round things were used to print these stain marks with pigmented black ink, scanned at high res.

Keywords:
background, base, beverage, black, bottle, bottom, caffeine, circle, coaster, coffee, cruddy, cup, design, desk, dirt, drink, drips, element, glass, grunge, grungy, ink, liquid, mark, mess, messy, mono, mug, old, paint, paper, pattern, prints, rings, round, runs, single, spill, splatter, stain, texture, used, water, wet, white

Image Buyers Click below:

Photographers sell your work and make money, Click below:

After reading the article over at www.microstockdiaries.com I decided I should work my own Sell thru Rate out, you can read the article for yourselves if you need to know how to work it out 😉 I like these results because they are in no way influenced by referrals or referral earnings.

Sold Images Total Images Sell thru Rate
Istockphoto 322 815 0.3951
Canstockphoto 105 949 0.1106
Bigstockphoto 125 801 0.1561
Fotolia 292 786 0.3715
Dreamtime 397 844 0.4704
Shutterstock 584 717 0.8145
Stockxpert 216 797 0.2710
123RF 135 943 0.1432
Crestock 34 372 0.0914
Total= 2.8237


This makes for some interesting viewing, it shows some subtle differences in what I thought were the best selling sites:

The Leader Board For Sell-Thru: The Leader Board for Sales:
1/ Shutterstock 1/ Shutterstock
2/ Dreamstime 2/ iStockphoto
3/ iStockphoto 3/ Fotolia
4/ Fotolia 4/ Dreamstime
5/ Stockxpert 5/ Stockxpert
6/ BigStockPhoto 6/ 123RF
7/ 123RF 7/ BigStockPhoto
8/ CanStockPhoto 8/ CanStockPhoto
9/ Crestock 9/ Crestock

So now we can see that apart from Shutterstock still being ‘the daddy’, Dreamstime is out in front of iStock which ties into the sales pattern I get from Dreamstime which always seems to sell images of all ages whether newly submitted or older images that I never thought would sell. You do hear about the different agencies weighting their search alogirithm (a mathematical equation that filters the results) in favour of new images and ‘best match’ etc and I’d say this pretty much proves that.

Or… maybe its the easy way that Dreamstime give you referral image HTML code for self promotional use helps ease it in front of iStock?! Because its easier, due to Dreamstime’s features, I self-promote my DT images there more than any other agency. Hmmm… *strokes chin* 😉

Bicycles in Beijing

My shot is at the top left, the ‘Bicycles in Beijing’ 🙂 I found this image with images.devilfinder.com which I’d never used before but someone had found my blog with it so I gave it a go and did a bit of searching for myself. Its nice to see myself, my photography, in print 🙂 I’d be unsure which agency it was purchased from so here’s the list of places you can buy my shot:

www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=1428098
www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=1579898
www.canstockphoto.com/Beijing-China—Bike-0248905.php
www.canstockphoto.com/Beijing-China—Bike-0248878.php

www.bigstockphoto.com/photo/view/432162
www.bigstockphoto.com/photo/view/432165

www.fotolia.com/id/439726/
www.fotolia.com/id/439730/
www.dreamstime.com/beijing-china—portrait-view-of-bicycles-rimage585212
www.shutterstock.com/pic.mhtml?id=1415610
www.stockxpert.com/browse.phtml?f=view&id=111143
www.stockxpert.com/browse.phtml?f=view&id=111122
www.123rf.com/photo_510860.html
www.123rf.com/photo_510764.html

Description:
Stock Photo In Beijing, China, Tiananmen Square / Beihai Park, Forbidden City…

Keywords:
bicycle, bike, pavement, walkway, sidewalk, ancient, architecture, beihai, beijing, bowuguan, building, chairman, china, chinese, city, clear, communism, communist, communists, courtyard, cultural, dynasty, emperor, flag, forbidden, gate, gugon, heavenly, historic, history, imperial, landmark, mandarin, mao, ming, monument, ornate, pagoda, palace, park, pavilion, peace, peking, peoples, prc, qing, red, republic, revolution, roof, shang, shrine, sky, square, summer, temple, tianamen, tiananmen, tree, zedong,

Here’s the Dreamstime referral image: 🙂
Beijing China - Portrait view of Bicycles
© Photographer: Pdtnc | Agency: Dreamstime.com

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.

Stock Average / Day Average/ Month
     
Istockphoto 1.69 USD 51.31 USD
CanStockPhoto 0.11 USD 3.48 USD
BigStockPhoto 0.23 USD 6.92 USD
Fotolia 1.07 USD 32.71 USD
Dreamstime 1.48 USD 45.11 USD
Shutterstock 2.36 USD 71.97 USD
StockXpert 0.83 USD 25.28 USD
123RF 0.21 USD 6.38 USD

Current Royalty Free stock earnings for each site.

Stock Earnings Totals
   
Istockphoto 1,013.12 USD
CanStockPhoto 53.95 USD
BigStockPhoto 107.38 USD
Fotolia 503.96 USD
Dreamstime 699.57 USD
Shutterstock 884.36 USD
StockXpert 378.80 USD
123RF 74.78 USD

Sales and Images online totals.

Stock Sales Images Online
     
Istockphoto 1558 573
CanStockPhoto 87 717
BigStockPhoto 156 592
Fotolia 441 632
Dreamstime 822 614
Shutterstock 2983 580
StockXpert 335 671
123RF 140 686

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

Earning Days Stock
   
601 Istockphoto
472 CanStockPhoto
472 BigStockPhoto
469 Fotolia
472 Dreamstime
374 Shutterstock
456 StockXpert
357 123RF

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

🙂


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