MicrostockGroup

My sales were slowly increasing with LO until the end of June and have been going down ever since.  Now, I have gone from having 16 sales in a month to just one in the past 14 days.  My views have also gone down.  Bryan has mentioned a few times in the past months that new sales records are being made, so why have my sales crashed?

Has something changed with the search or have the free tokens run out?  Is this just a temporary situation or something more serious?  I am not going to continue uploading to a site that sells less and less of my photos.  All the other sites I am on are doing well and this is usually a good time of the year for sales.

Jan: 2
Feb: 0
Mar: 1
Apr: 2
May: 0
Jun: 3
Jul: 3
Aug: 1
Sep: 4
Oct: 1

Total: 17
Views: 8757 (record: Tropical acrobat on beach; 455 views, 0 downloads [and very defective watermark on a 500px! thumb])
Earnings: 11$80

Sales: promises, promises, promises. I stopped uploading for now. A year at LO is a typical 2-3 days at SS. Don't worry, sales will come at LO, when Saturnus is aligned with Mars and Venus. Sometimes, you must let go....

i still have hope   but then again I have managed to get a sale every now and again - often from the sideshow.  I think their site is really one of the most attractive.  They have kept is clean and simple, and almost 'fun' to click around.

Their customer getting skills haven't been proven yet, and I agree it always seems to be wait, wait, wait, they are coming.  If they weren't so easy to upload to I would stop too, but it really only takes less than a minute to get 50 images online.

LO is fun, very well done and friendly reviewers. The sideshow? I wouldn't know since this text keeps popping up that I need 83 more sales to get there. LO would be a big blow for my feeble ego and chase me back to Flickr, but then... there is SS, and they sell. So I keep telling myself that it's not all crap what I shoot ;-)

well i wouldn't give up on shutterstock just yet.  They make up almost 50% of my earnings.  I would work VERY hard and getting in.... if I were me.

Im giving LO one more month.

I have to agree. They seem to have some of the best images available on the web, their web-site looks good and works very well, and still, they are not able sell. Very surprising. In this case, it's not even worth waiting for a payout. I'll probably get mine in ten years or so   

I had 13 sales so far this month but only one sideshow and no ELs.

I can't beat it, but I have one that is way up there as well.

1436 views no downloads.

How do I see views for individual images?

Hey guys, I published a chart of our sales growth over the past year on our blog:

http://www.luckyoliver.com/blog/270/sales_graph


Also, my last post in a different thread might be helpful for some artists:

Hey guys, here are a few more data points.

1. Images in the database are building up three times faster than the first half of the year. Some dilution is occurring because our buyer growth hasn't quite kept up with the image growth (though we've had 12 consecutive months of online revenue growth).  We're working on it!

2. We're still putting free tokens in the hands of users, but those probably account for a very small percentage of downloads. It's more of a warm-up.

3. The next year is going to be focused on building our buyer community. We have to improve our architecture to scale.  Right now this is preventing growth.  We're in the process of doubling our capacity to handle traffic.

4. New images might take some time to get exposure based on our search engine.  As our traffic increases this will minimize, but short term it might have an impact on views.  We also have a couple new features which will increase visibility of images.

5. So far results are a little varied from artist to artist, but we have people that are making monthly payouts.  We seem to be getting a lot more extended license and sideshow sales which can make up for the volume.  General trend?  Those with lots of downloads get more downloads.

Hope this helps.

19,109 views in about 13 months
pretty low average of # of dl's a month

Pretty slow but I also like the ease of uploading to them although I wish they'd put a feature so you could select multiple pictures and then add the model release(s) to all of them at the same time.

It did. A lot. The Matthew effect is built into the search engine and the site setup then. That's pretty  cool. I got 11$ till now on LO (projected payout 2016), and about 10x as much on Featurepics. Sure, I probably shoot crap, but I just don't understand why ShutterStock makes me as much in 3 days as LO in a year. Maybe because I upload 10MP to LO and just 6MP to SS?

The watermark on light shots is still defective. The all-mighty business-guru declared solemnly that watermarks don't matter because Dan Heller told so. Pretty cool too. I just miss the meat. Where is the meat? I won't pay for a sideshow just as I won't pay on Photoshelter. Sales on LO would skyrocket in March 2007 after a breath-taking ad campaign. Didn't see anything though.

Well, the big guys might enjoy a lot of EL's and many payouts, and so be it. Good for them and may the upload spirit always be with them. More Yuri, Andresr, Phildate, Deal on LO then. I'm just a crap amateur in the long tail and I rather offer my stuff for free on the *real* Flickr. It will save me the time to reduce noise on 10MP shots, Flickr is happy with 1MP, and SS with 6MP.

Update: I'm about to cancel my LO account. I keep the email on hold till tomorrow. Anybody has any good argument to stay on LO?