Pretty much as expected not seeing much growth in the amount I've earned from actual new files (most of my income is from files > 6 months old) but overall my stock photo income is growing on SS, DT and iS. However erratic it may be month to month, the overall trend is upwards. Though I only had card sales on FAA this month, it's been earning me $50-190 per print sale most months, and with occasional sales due to people finding images on my website, I'm cautiously optimistic about selling stock photos.

I've done some cold-calling to a few places that buy stock images with hopeful results so I'm thinking that may be where I put the bulk of my energies for the next few months, submitting RM files and lists of what I have available to various travel agencies, magazines, and calendar companies, together with putting all the RF files I have on Alamy onto the micros since my RPI on Alamy doesn't justify my leaving them there exclusively. My average sale on Alamy is now less than $50 with less than $25 coming to me, and most RM sales there net me $15-18, a fee I can easily earn from a "single & other download" file on SS, and about the same or less than I can earn from an extended license there or elsewhere.

I'm reluctant to add more files to iStock but my RPI is good there despite the fact that (a) all my photo+ files which were my best sellers are now stuck in the Main collection and (b) most of my income there is from the PP, so I may add a few new files there. RPI doesn't lie.

I just did a detailed analysis of my RPI for the entire year and it has increased more than I'd expected on SS, DT and even on iS, while it has decreased significantly on Alamy. I forget where I read a discussion about this, but RPI is really the most important thing to look at because it gives you a decent comparison of how each site is doing for you, whether your portfolio there is large or small. If my RPI is rising on the micros, that tells me my photo portfolios are improving and it gives me an idea of how much more I can expect to earn for every photo I add.

I think the keys are marketing my work directly to buyers who need the kinds of images I shoot, letting me earn 100% of the profit, and uploading to the sites that have a proven track record so they can market those other images for me.

If you sell 200 images in that year and get 200 free spots, and those sell too (assuming the RPI of $40), then the photographer will earn $16,000 - 10,000 = $6,000. That's a decent profit for a $10K investment in one year (of course we're discounting the cost of the photos etc).

Do you have to be accepted by Getty to do PC or can anyone who's willing to pay to play upload their images via that route? And do you pay a one-time fee of $50 or is that an annual fee? It does seem outrageous that they get the lion's share of the profit on photos that you have paid to have them host, but I've heard of others in PC who feel the investment was worth it.

Anyone else care to comment?

Hate that they are now selling tiffs as subs but on the other hand I had my BME there in August so I guess the volume is making up for the level 4 and 5 sales that are now subs. Still annoyed about the subs  even if I'm actually making more now. It just seems like they're giving away the store.

Shutterstock - 2nd BMY - up 115% from July
Dreamstime - BME - up 10% from my second BME and up 38% from July
iStock - won't really know til I get partner sales since they make up most of my income there, but pretty negligible after a BME last month
Alamy-    (Tons of zooms including a few using the file number itself so hoping this means some decent sales will show up soon - it's been a drought there lately).
Fine Art America - continuing to get sales every month.
My Photoshelter account continues to be worthwhile. Made some sales and was also contacted by a museum in Chicago that was specifically searching on Photoshelter. It looks like they may license on of my photos to use as part of a science exhibit scheduled for the spring. I highly recommend their platform. http://www.photoshelter.com/referral/MA2CA7TC7J

Wish I could help. The best I've got is a gorilla picking its nose. 

After a slow June & July with returns that I now see are average according to the dls/day/per file etc, SS has come roaring back for me to earn returns of $1.10 per download - not going to make me rich but at least things seem to be back to normal.

Uploaded some creative mixed media stuff lately including stuff I've taken on my iPhone and reworked in PS and it was all accepted. Will be interesting to see if it sells. My port is far from traditional microstock so it was good to see that it compares favorably in terms of returns per file and also is more than twice the RPI than the SS average - I guess most of us are earning well above the average return since there are still plenty of photos on there that don't sell at all, but I was worried when after having a fair number of images on page 1 for one-word fairly common search terms, a lot of my work had dropped back by several pages. Close to a BME and there's still a week to go.

And my SS stock is earning for me too. Gotta have all the bases covered, greedy stockholder that I am 

Way better deal for us than the getty/google deal. We'll get paid for each use and people don't actually access the files, guess FB will pay SS and they collect for the "free" photos as part of their ad revenues. This is why SS is earning money and iStock is having a tough time. It sounds like a really workable way to take advantage of revenue opportunities.

I don't imagine many people buy photos to use on FB (I've collected from infringers who took work from my site for their FB pages, but don't see people actively seeking out stock for FB so this taps into a market that wasn't really there before). Since the uses are limited to thumbnails via the FB interface, it could lead people who want to use the image for other advertising over to SS to license photos they like for other non-FB marketing and advertising. Could be a win-win.

In the few months that I've owned SSTK stock, I'm up over 27%, netting more than I've made from SS since I started with them. I guess if Yuri were an investor he'd be paying closer attention to how the stock is actually performing. But even if SSTK went down 12% tomorrow, I'd still be ahead of the game. And if iS beats out SS, all my eggs aren't in one basket. In fact, stock is just one small portion of my photo income. Yuri's on another planet as far as the size of his portfolio, the kind of work he produces, and his ability to negotiate a deal, so what he does, while it's interesting in a general �what's happening in the stock photo world?� kind of way, it doesn't affect my choices.

I didn't really learn much about shooting stock until I joined SS and saw downloads nearly every day, even early on with a very tiny portfolio. It showed me what kind of stuff worked for me and confirmed that when I shoot what I enjoy it actually sells. I don't love all the changes there but the site runs well, they pay me on time without my having to ask them to, they report earnings nearly instantaneously, they answer emails and even the telephone, and they can even do math! On a gut level, I hate the subscription model, but SS knows how to make it work.

Yuri�s welcome to hype his work and look out for himself. I don't really get the anger here. He's styled himself as the world's leading stock photographer for years now, so why should the size of his ego surprise or infuriate anyone? Bad grammar and poor spelling are the bane of the internet, though you'd think someone on his staff could read and write English.

If he's looking to take over Getty or iS from the inside I wish him all the luck in the world, but I doubt that's the ace up his sleeve. I'm afraid he's just scrambling like the rest of us, wondering when the hordes with their iPhones are going to muscle in on our business, and trying to keep the cash cow running for a few more years. Printing fine art or shooting a print campaign is one thing, but iPhone photos can look great on the web - in fact, I've seen them blown up as huge printed panoramas with surprising quality.

I'll stick with my DSLRs for the most part, but I do love having a camera with me all the time that doesn't weigh a ton. For something that's a phone, a mini-computer (with more power than my first HP), a game console, magazine rack, mini-kindle, and camera rolled into one, it takes pretty good pictures. But then, if you�ll pardon my ego, I'm the one pushing the button. 

Second BMY for me on DT in July.

I too hate seeing my level 5 images sell as subs but this month a continued increase in the volume of sales kept me on track.

After a terrible drop off some months back am seeing sales and income growth there again. I haven't added anything new there in a while and had started adding fewer files there than I would on SS and iS to avoid my images competing with each other for levels, but may add a couple of similars (different angles of the same item - not too similar) going forward given the new pricing paradigm there now. Last year I saw RPD's some months of $3-4.29, this year I'm averaging $2, so I need to sell 1.5-2x more just to stay even. I have a lot of level 4 and 5 images so the sub sales are hurting my bottom line - not sure what effect the new credit packs will have. Will have to see going forward - it could increase RPD if it means less subs.

Ultimately, I'm more concerned with my monthly net and my RPI rather than my RPD since a high RPD with low sales volume can earn me less than a low RPD with high sales volume - but the RPD was a fair indicator of how I was moving up in terms of percentage of high level files. Now, the lower RPD is more a reflection of a large increase in sub sales rather than a falling RPI. So, it's really not as useful an indicator anymore.

Discouraged by pricing but somewhat encouraged by overall growth there.

Next time my husband works on in the yard I'll have to photograph his arm a few days later - with and without the calamine lotion.

You've gotten some great answers to your question - if walking around a city with your camera isn't a great idea - take a walk around your house - try different perspectives of objects in their regular setting. Good luck!

My PP sales have exceeded my regular sales the last couple of months.  that subs are doing better with iS - at least for this non-exclusive - than anything else.  Without my P+ photos - which accounted for most of my regular iS sales, it's not going to be a pretty picture.

There's good news and bad news for me this month:

The    : Thanks to a direct stock photo sale last June (2012), that had been my BME until April 2013 topped it. This June has beaten last June by 35% thanks to another direct license to a large publisher, as well as a nice sale on FAA (even if I don't count the $189 - net to me - from the print sale of one of my editorial stock images on FAA, I still top last June, making this my third BME for stock photo sales).

The    : Alamy is half what it was last June (but it's so erratic for me there since licensing fees vary so widely), SS is slightly up from last June but just barely and still at about 50% of what I had been anticipating given strong growth there in late 2012-early 2013 (i.e., it's even with last's month's underperformance), DT is more than double last June and actually neck-and-neck with SS, but half what it was before they started knocking down the sub prices for levels 4 & 5.

The  : iS is double last June even without PP, but my port there is so tiny (<45 photos), so even huge jumps up & down aren't significant given my small numbers. The amounts earned on fotolia and bigstock aren't even worth mentioning, though I'm getting a payout from fotolia this month, so that's a  .