Im very close to a nice milestone as well

Congratulations to all the successful ones!

DaLiu: super nice portfolio - well deserved. And you've also been busy over the last few years - the portfolio has grown considerably.

I myself have only passed the 80,000 mark, even though - like Big Money - I've been with shutterstock since 2010.

For me I have only 7873 images and 186 videos. I do this as a hobby thus part time and shoot only what I want to do. Never wanted the pressure of this being my main income source thus I am not considered a professional photographer. Plus a very high end professional told me that if I did photography for a living it would ruin it.

It's also a hobby for me. But I started it with serious intentions. One year before shutterstock at fotolia.

There was the financial crisis, which started sometime in 2008. That was the time when companies were saving money. The marketing sector was badly affected. Budgets were set to zero, so my office had a correspondingly difficult time.

As there was correspondingly little to do, I dived into the microstock business in 2009 and invested my surplus time in images for Fotolia. And a good year later, I also invested in shutterstock and other agencies.

Unfortunately, I haven't been very motivated for a few years now. But it was definitely not a mistake to have done that back then - it still brings a little extra money into the till today, although nowhere near as much as it did a few years ago. And when I think that I could have wasted the time pointlessly, it was definitely the right decision. And even if the future in this area should develop in such a way that Microstock disappears from the market, it has to be said that it has been worthwhile to be part of it in the last few years.

I was also very lucky that the algorithms were kind to me with a few images. 10 images make up a quarter of the shutterstock downloads. At AS there are 11 (mostly other) images that make up a quarter of the total downloads there. Since I have 10% more images online at AS, this is almost identical.

I had to notice that the "success" is extremely dependent on the decisions of the review. And this review certainly had it easier in the past than it does today - simply because there were fewer images to select.

My most successful image on shutterstock sold 34 times more often there than on AS. That actually says it all. We depend on the decisions of the review and the algorithms based on that decision...

mindoozas and DaLiu: I'm curious, and since you both started much later, I'd be interested to know whether your downloads are spread over more files, or whether a few files make up a larger part of your downloads.

In my case downloads are spread over more files, I have best sellers of course but I sell a lot of different photos, here are my all times best performers and they count under 10% of my total downloads.