MicrostockGroup
Microstock Photography Forum - General => Newbie Discussion => Topic started by: grejak on January 09, 2019, 15:57
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I am just interested as new stock uploader, when do photos start to sell after you upload them? I got some sells but i am talking about bigger numbers, i am also uploading daily and around 200 photos monthly :) Hopefully someone else shares his/hers experience
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Backyardsilver.com has good info on relationship between new images and sales, broken down by different agencies.
Your question is quite generic so the generic answer is that it all depends on your content.
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I am just interested as new stock uploader, when do photos start to sell after you upload them? I got some sells but i am talking about bigger numbers, i am also uploading daily and around 200 photos monthly :) Hopefully someone else shares his/hers experience
It was much easier in the 'good old days'!
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I am just interested as new stock uploader, when do photos start to sell after you upload them? I got some sells but i am talking about bigger numbers, i am also uploading daily and around 200 photos monthly :) Hopefully someone else shares his/hers experience
It was much easier in the 'good old days'!
Good answer and for "big numbers' never. Someone else and I'm sure many have said the same. This isn't a sprint it's a marathon. You don't get fast sales and big numbers anymore, you get good sales of some images over a long period.
For me and what I do, I get about one photo a year that gets hooked in and keeps selling over and over. My best sellers on one site are generally among the best sellers on every site. That's SS, AS and IS for example, not Alamy which has very different images than anyplace Microstock. But I have a file on SS that I think has one sale or maybe two, that is one of my top ten on AS, and gets random sales on IS. What I'm getting at, is often, a small number of photos, make the majority of sales and different sites have different favorites, but the top images are still pretty much the same group, everywhere.
Others may have different experiences.
The other part that has been true since the start is this. As new people upload more and more, their sales increase. At some point, they upload more and more, but the sales do not improve proportional to the number of files. In fact, income goes almost flat with a small increase for many more photos. That's pretty normal and common. Keep shooting, keep adding your best, and don't think that how many photos is as important as What Are The Images.
200 great photos will make the same amount as 200 great photos and 3,800 filler photos that do nearly nothing.
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By the time I got 200 images up (in 2007) I was making (for me) good money (at the time I was homeless and unemployed so it was a low bar) and I had all sorts of fun with extrapolating out into the future. As the years passed I made more $, but $/image went down. After about 2012 $/image started dropping faster. On some sites I made less in December 2018 than I did back when I had about 300 images.
At some point you will hit a wall unless you can keep reinventing your work or seriously up the production rate without compromising salability. After that even with more production you will make less. Other than a few sudden drops when a site totally messes with the search this will probably be a long slow decline. Cheery huh?
If I was starting now I doubt I'd stick with it.
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...Your question is quite generic so the generic answer is that it all depends on your content.
It depends on content and keywording skills.
Without seeing your portfolio no one can give you any useful information, and even then, good content in a competitive category can be harder that if you can find themes with relatively low supply but decent buyer demand. Perhaps you have access to locations and authentic models for some type of business or industry setting that will allow you to do really well, for example.
Crap keywords will render good content invisible. And starting this year is harder than starting a year or two ago; or five years, or 10...
Probably you should do some searches for yourself using keywords from some of your images to see what your competition is. You may be able to see for yourself
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About a year after I started I was really proud to make my $220 car payment off monthly earnings. lol. Hope that helps.