It appears to me that perhaps you are attempting to pick a fight with yourself.

Your return on your investment in time spent to create and make your images available for downloading to buyers.
Is that what you're discussing here?

If so consider that you do so because of choice. There are no one single winners when it comes to microstock sites.
Each plays a contributing factor to the end product. It takes what it take....till it takes. What ever that is.

Stop trying to find fault. They all play a role in contributing to the month end bank roll. Stop looking at them individually
and start looking at the big picture. Your looking looking for a complicated solution in the simple game of microstock.

Cranky MIZ
The voice of reason

PS I don't really expect to change your point of view, I just felt like typing a few words

Stay focused

Cranky MIZ
The voice of reason

It appears to me that perhaps you are attempting to pick a fight with yourself....

I never thought I'd say this, but I think I agree with Miz.

Between this thread and your other one about how much you make per hour in microstock, it does seem like you are looking for every fault and flaw in microstock, almost trying to publicly talk yourself out of it. This isn't a game of dollars per hour, costs per image uploaded at a particular site, etc. Think about the long-term value here, not the hourly rate. This isn't a factory or grocery store where you clock in and out and get paid for exactly the time you put in. Microstock earnings are calculated on a much longer timeline, and many people (myself included) don't even give any consideration to hourly, daily, or even weekly trends. I only look at earnings in terms of monthly and yearly values, because only from those broader perspectives do I get any real sense of what I earn.

Also consider the passive nature of microstock earnings. Look at the thread in this forum about the guy who hasn't uploaded anything in 8 months and continues to earn monthly sums of about half his BME. That's 8 months of doing absolutely nothing, investing not a single hour, and still earning all the while. Think about how much money some of the top people would earn if they just stopped uploading today. Guys like Yuri and Andres would bring in 6-figure annual incomes for a few years without doing anything at all. How's that for earnings potential?

Also how do you divide the cost?

Studio Shoot may cost $300 Studio Model Props expences plus your time add another $200 from that you may get 20 lets say 30 from 300-400 images, now how do I allocate cost they all took some element of time, $500 / 300 = $1.66 per image, now I need to write off 270 of these images, or I could say $16.66 per Image to submit, 30 post process and uploads $60 time and materials, $18.66 For each of the 30 I want to upload, I am goint to upload to 4 sites that is $4.66 per image per site, if I had a rejection rate of 25% that would mean an adjustment to $5.82 per image online as I now have 88 (22 x 4 sites) from 120 submitted.

Should each image now stand on it's own or do I say "Woopee!" when I have 40 $1.00 downloads from a batch that could have cost me $560 to produce?

Or I could just go into the garden or take the family out for a day, get lots of shots negate the cost, because I had a good day out as well and just count all downloads as profit, "I would have gone out with the family and taken photographs anyway, or photography is my hobby anyway so it don't matter!"

See it depends on if you are taking stock for a living and earning a wage, what the subject is and how you run your business, some guys go abroad just to take stock images and claim the cost against thier earning, others take photographs on holiday and submit these, the chargable cost element is different for the same style of image, taken by two different photographers at the same time and location.

For a lot of us if we wrote down all our costs, kit, power, depreciation, expences and counted all the hours spent doing stock images and used the minimum wage to calculate and add into our costs, then took this figure from our total stock revenue minus taxes etc:, we would likely be left with a positive or negative profit, then add up all images live from all sites, divide the profit by that and you are left with your net revenue per online image.

If I was offered it as a job I would likely say "You want me to pay you how much!" 

Another point I see a lot calculate thier RPI from the best site, but your RPI is all revenue from all sites divided by your image count from all sites, so a slow site will affect your RPI across all sites.

Currently I am off the micros and have had 1 sale on Alamy and I had at the time only 10 images on Alamy so at the time $8.50 RPI, but now with 54 images as of today and I also have 37 on Photoshelter my current RPI is Alamy $85/54 = 1.57, PhotoShelter = $0.00 and a total RPI of $85 / 91 = 0.98.

See I can twist it both ways and another single sale will blow that out of the water, with no more sales but more uploads this will affect my total RPI .

David

If we all start thinking so analytically like a Costing Manager,
we would all quit making photographs in an instance;
or start to shoot like a mass-production machine .
Results: our images will be hoaky ( fake ) ,and the buyers will sense that too.

Some photographers do just that, Yuri has people post processing and keywording like a production line, and then there are other specialist photographers that have expectations of a revenue return for a shoot that is calculated before they lift the camera.

David

It is a valid question the one you ask.  I can tell you that it will depend on the style of your shooting.  I see that people focus just on RPI and many don�t take into account the time spent in sorting them, selecting and editing images, adjusting their color, cropping, then uploading, and also all costs involved:  from electric energy and fuel to getting to the shooting place to all other costs involved.  And if you use models then the administrative costs of managing the model releases can be a burden when you have several hundred going around.

It all costs money (and time... well, time is money).  In the long run you can recover this money, but if the time needed is too long then you have to take into account other financial considerations into the equation. 

If you see this as a business you should ask and ask yourself all these questions and find out if it is worth the effort.  Only you can put a value on your time according to the living standards of your city or country.  Then you will be able to decide what to do.  Otherwise, it will be just a paid hobby and sometimes, depending on your talent, a money losing one.

Hey Asiaphoto,

Thanks for sharing, and of course one thing that really affects costs per image more than anything is your shot count from a day. We really try and optimize (i mean really) a day of shooting to get the absolute most out of it.

For a single model, studio 300 shots @ $4-5 per. Other end of the spectrum, location, 5 models and 200 selects @ $22 dollars per image.

From discussions with Yuri his shot cost is roughly the same, but he does really optimize his shooting to get a lot out of every day.

Hope that gives some insight.

Josh

Wow, it always gives me a start when I read a re-opened thread without realizing it and come across a post by the Miz (Rijmiz)