MicrostockGroup
Microstock Photography Forum - General => General Stock Discussion => Topic started by: oxman on April 14, 2011, 15:46
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Some of you have large portfolios producing significant income. Are many of you at a point where you upload less or not at all and just enjoy the fruits of your labor? If so, do your earnings diminish if you do not consistently add to your collection?
I guess what I am asking is, is it feasible (or logical) to build a healthy portfolio -- 3,000 to 8,000 images for instance with an RPI of +$1 -- and then sit back and do nothing. Would such a situation be, in a sense, create a nice retirement account that will hold its value or perhaps increase its "dividends".
Can you retire from microstock and reap a nice income into eternity?
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Nothing is certain. Companies get bought and sold or go under. Ebb and flow.
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There has been quite a few people who have stopped uploading at one time or another for a few months or year or two. I stopped for about a year once and saw my income drop to about 80% of what it was at it's highest. Once it was there it was fairly stable, but how many years it would be stable is uncertain, and the future of microstock is obviously uncertain.
So yeah, you could sit back for 1, 2, 3 maybe 4 years and earn probably 60-80% of your income but after that who knows. Maybe it would continue for 10 years maybe not. It also depends on how time sensitive your images. If you are shooting extremely trendy people, they will look pretty dated in a couple years. If you shoot wildlife and nature they will almost not become dated at all (except perhaps processing styles and techniques)
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The return per image per month keeps steadily dropping, so you need ever more photos to keep your earnings static.
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The return per image per month keeps steadily dropping, so you need ever more photos to keep your earnings static.
This is true. However once the motivation to earn a living from microstock has been realised a certain laziness can set in too. It's not always easy to stay motivated when you have a large portfolio and the efforts of a days/weeks/months effort become hardly noticable against the greater mass of images already earning.
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This is true. However once the motivation to earn a living from microstock has been realised a certain laziness can set in too. It's not always easy to stay motivated when you have a large portfolio and the efforts of a days/weeks/months effort become hardly noticable against the greater mass of images already earning.
So true!!
To answer the OP, I haven't been brave enough to stop uploading for longer than a couple of weeks. Even so, I have seen a gradual decline from last year's earnings.
New images don't sell all that well as a proportion of the whole, so I probably wouldn't notice an immediate dropoff. However, if I stopped for 6 months or more I am afraid that even after I resumed uploading it would be hard to make up for the lost momentum.
OTOH, reports from people like Tyler who have actually taken time off seem to be pretty encouraging.
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I rarely upload any more. Maybe 2 or 3 per month maximum for the last year or so. It is just too little money to make a big deal of it. I have 715 images on IS and 769 on SS with smaller amounts on FT, DT, and FP. I must say that sales keep coming in on a fairly constant basis. My 2 or 3 best sellers on IS have maintained their downloads per month performance rate of sale for over a year. My total sales, like most folks here have reported, have dwindled slowly as the total cumulative image counts have risen across the sites. I think that the search engines are finding my images regardless of their age and that my sales attrition would have happened regardless of how many more uploads I made. I don't think many of us can keep up with the huge numbers of new images on a percentage basis. Thank God I don't have to make a living in this business.
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Uploading has little effect.
Not uploading is even worse.
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Uploading has little effect.
Not uploading is even worse.
Yes but its little if any point in uploading when the files goes to the last page and will never see the light of day. There they will rest in peace untill you get a notification of no sale and they are removed.
so much for that.
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Uploading has little effect.
Not uploading is even worse.
Yes but its little if any point in uploading when the files goes to the last page and will never see the light of day. There they will rest in peace untill you get a notification of no sale and they are removed.
so much for that.
I agree but there is SS that gives you always sales for new pictures and perhaps a long run depending the picture sales :P