Pfff...maybe ok month for me but still crappy + 700 USD on both SS and AS, only ones worth mentioning, maybe 250 on IS, but the rest are not even peanut shells. This is by all means poverty line. I am not speaking US, Dubai, New York, but somewhere country side .................and grande economies, but lets say average Europe with small salaries, at 2000 euro you keep your head floating just at the limit, at 3000 euro maybe you can make a decent living but not at middle class. Stock is not for sissies definitely.

Quote from: poco_bw on July 06, 2025, 16:09
Pfff...maybe ok month for me but still crappy + 700 USD on both SS and AS, only ones worth mentioning, maybe 250 on IS, but the rest are not even peanut shells. This is by all means poverty line. I am not speaking US, Dubai, New York, but somewhere country side .................and grande economies, but lets say average Europe with small salaries, at 2000 euro you keep your head floating just at the limit, at 3000 euro maybe you can make a decent living but not at middle class. Stock is not for sissies definitely.

The new Empress sissi loves AIDobe, she ate all the other princesses. But she really stinks!
She likes to feel the fingers of AI prompters that caress her 


Stock photography can still feed some who feed with peanuts, for sure! 

2nd best month on SS and best month on AS in 10 years.

I'm having a bad month overall. Only AS is holding the position. Everything else is going down

My August stats, more or less in-line with the latest monthly averages.
Interesting to observe that, for the past 3 months, SS has fallen behind IS.

It's unfortunate (correct me if I am wrong) that seemingly we can no longer see any poll results as these give a somewhat broader and more "averaged" view than individual results.

August was 25% less than July 25 and 47% less than August last year.

Rejection at Adobe led to very few new accepted files and that had a bad result for the month, even more than the summer slowdown.

In total I am still ahead 6% yoy, but If autumn does not improve the year will sadly end at a loss.

Now focussing on videos and camera content but that will not sell quickly enough to save 2025.

Average September, but still the best month of 2025.

The same photo again. Previously, there was one sale for $450.

That's sick brother, never had such a big photo sale, I think the biggest one I had was 140$.

That is an incredible image sale.

Have you been able to find it in use somewhere?

The highest for me was something around 250 dollars via Getty at some point.

Quote from: mindoozas on October 09, 2025, 06:21

The same photo again. Previously, there was one sale for $450.

When I click on your screenshot, I am taken to a page called "imgbb." But the screenshot says Shutterstock. Can you please explain this contradiction?

Quote from: Wilm on October 11, 2025, 07:50

Quote from: mindoozas on October 09, 2025, 06:21

The same photo again. Previously, there was one sale for $450.

When I click on your screenshot, I am taken to a page called "imgbb." But the screenshot says Shutterstock. Can you please explain this contradiction?

Wilm -Imgbb is an image hosting site. Upload to there in order to post it on MSG (you cannot upload images direct to here).

I upload all my screenshots directly to msg.

Just click on attachments and select the file.

Quote from: cobalt on October 11, 2025, 10:41
I upload all my screenshots directly to msg.

Just click on attachments and select the file.

Thanks for the correction Jasmine! Confusing MSG with some forums where you have to have images hosted elsewhere.

probably reddit

Quote from: Newsfocus1 on October 11, 2025, 10:29

Quote from: Wilm on October 11, 2025, 07:50

Quote from: mindoozas on October 09, 2025, 06:21

The same photo again. Previously, there was one sale for $450.

When I click on your screenshot, I am taken to a page called "imgbb." But the screenshot says Shutterstock. Can you please explain this contradiction?

Wilm -Imgbb is an image hosting site. Upload to there in order to post it on MSG (you cannot upload images direct to here).

Ah, okay - thank you for this explanation. (But cobalt/Jasmine is right - you can upload screenshots directly here)

droneguy quit his day job to do only stock.

last year he earned 34k, this year he earned that in 9 months.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eokB31WJgq4

there is still money in stock

Yes, of course there is still money in microstock, but it is only for very few contributors, and in any case, the distribution of earnings is not fair (Getty Images 85%/Contributors 15% for example ... Youtubers receive 55% from the Google Ads program).

So, there are many more full-time YouTubers than full-time Microstock Contributors. Today, producing video content on YT platform is more profitable than making photographs or short videos.

Isn't the difference that YouTube caters to the general public, so has a much larger, literally billion people viewers and customers?

Commercial license buyers is a tiny group of people, somewhere in the merger documents they stated that they only have 1.4 million customers combined.

And they need an active sales team and have a lot more customer interactions than YouTube where ad revenue comes from views, not direct customer interaction.

I would obviously love to earn much more, but I am not sure if the business model of YouTube is a good comparison.

There are also a lot more people with very large merch or Etsy stores, they can generate several hundred k oder over a million dollars a year in revenue, but for stock that is nearly impossible. Our portfolio never go viral.

So again, a very different business model.

Mony creators are building additional YouTube channels to squeeze more money out of their stock content or have merch stores or print stores for t shirts or wall art.

Again, I would love to earn more, but our customer group is simply very tiny.

The size of the business has nothing to do with it.

Spotify has more paying customers than YouTube, but it's probably even more greedy than the microstock agencies.

Microstock is moving toward Spotify, and it would be better if it went toward YouTube.

Greed is the right word.

Then be equally greedy and just work with the companies you prefer. Nobody is forced to do stock.

To me, the big issue is that the prices of stock have been driven so low...that is the issue....yet at the same time, there are "premium" agencies and divisions of agencies that charge a lot more and in many cases the product isn't really any "better"....lots of paradoxes here!! It seems the premium agencies have been able to keep prices at a much higher amount and maintain their customer base. The microstock agencies have failed at this, thus the "race to the bottom".

But you can also get a sale for several hundred dollars at the micros.

And macro stock is well known to also sell their premium files for 2 cents...

It all depends on the type of license the client wants, there is no one size fits all customers package.

If you want full control and have the quality, you can sell exclusively from your own website. There are still people that do that, usually successful work for hire creators.

It takes many years to build good relationships with clients, but then you can sell free from the agency pressure.

But most don't want to do the hard work and many simply do not offer the quality needed.

Second-best October ever, totaling $4,138.
Not bad!