Great month for me - easily a BME with total earnings over 10% more than the previous best (October 2012). I ended the month with $2216, helped by a regular set of sales, four EDs and a $70 single sale on Shutterstock, solid sales on iStock, some nice big sales on Alamy, and a pretty good month on most of the other sites. I now have 3300 images on Shutterstock and its interesting to note that only 10 months ago in January I ended up with $400 in sales on that site - $970 this month. As usual, more graphs on my blog, but here are the headlines:



Lets hope that December continues this run - that will make for a fantastic 2012 for me.

Steve

I wrote a pretty comprehensive workflow about 12 months ago - you may find it helpful.

Steve
http://www.backyardsilver.com/2011/03/my-work-flow-for-stock-photography/

I agree - they have a clear view of what they want - isolations, people food as Luis says. I have a high acceptance on those, but only 15 out of 84 on my recent St Martin's images. Funnily enough, my best sellers are travel and landscape shots - exactly the ones they reject! Even got an extended one this month for $25:



Steve

It is an interesting new feature, but the URLs seem a bit flaky. I can use my personalized URL: http://www.shutterstock.com/g/steveheap, but that always leads to the popular images in my portfolio. As soon as you move away to that to look at the galleries, the URL changes to a numeric version: http://www.shutterstock.com/gallery-138433/artist-picks

Now - how best to use this??

Steve

I've given up on new uploads. Just too much work with little reward.

Steve

Leaf asked a good question in the Earnings thread this month - do we need to add new images to maintain our earnings, and so I decided to analyse my Shutterstock earnings a bit to see how those have changed as I added new files, and how the percentage of earnings from the different categories of download changed over time. I then started a bigger bit of analysis to look at how the earnings per online file at the main agencies has changed. I use online files per agency as the indicator here, not total available images, as I know that some agencies (Fotolia and Dreamstime) don't like certain types of image and it seems wrong to penalize their performance because of that. I could choose not to upload certain types of image, but it is easier to upload the lot and then let them reject the ones they don't like.

Anyway, fuller analysis is on my blog as usual, but here are the highlights:


This graph just shows my earnings activity on Shutterstock - hard to see much detail, except that I have been working hard!


I then looked at how the earnings changed by category of download, and then turned that into a percentage graph to see if things had changed much over the past 2 years:


This seems to show that, on average, subscriptions give me 50% of earnings, ODs around 30%, and, although my EDs have dropped off since June 2012, Single downloads have picked up to make up the remaining 20%. It varies a bit from month to month, but the basic pattern holds.

My final graph is a work in progress as we are only one month into Q4 of 2012, but this shows the earnings per online file at the main agencies (and then a total for the "rest"). Again, there are ups and downs, but the basic pattern of $0.60 to $0.70 per online image per month is being maintained.


I'll come back to this analysis in January 2013 once Q4 is complete, but it appears to show a reasonably straight line relationship between online images and income. Add more images, get more money - things are neither getting better or worse for me in the microstock game in terms of income per accepted file.

Steve

impressive Steve, very nice indeed!

are you were including referral earnings in your statistics? if I have 1$ per month from that is a lot, stopped blogging 1 year ago and I was never very active too

Thanks! I feel good about last month, and this month is off to a great start with one of those famed $70 downloads on Shutterstock!

I do count referral income in my totals, and I've started adding in Zazzle as well (although I don't try hard there). Most of the sites are negligible in terms of referral income, but 123RF really surprised me. The contributor must be really selling well to result in me getting $60. It built up over the past 3 months as well so I don't think it is the combined efforts of a lot of people.

Steve

Monday morning review - 25 out of 27 rejected. I used to have such a good record at Shutterstock!

Steve

You prompted me to work out my rpi as well (where "i" is the number of images I have online with Istock, not the number of uploads). I get about 80% acceptance these days so they are not too far apart. Also, the number of images is the total at the end of each month which skews the results down a bit.

Anyway, caveats out of the way, I currently have 1744 photos online having grown to that number from 700 at the start of 2011. Income per online file was around $0.12 in early 2011, but went to $0.20 in Aug 2011 (Photo+?) and has stayed around that level ever since as I have grown my portfolio. September 2012 was exactly 20c.

I would like more, of course, but I don't find iStock to be that much incremental work (I use Deepmeta), and it is normally my second best seller.

Steve

You could always go to Warmpicture.com: http://www.warmpicture.com/ - that is where the happy contributors are these days!! 

Steve

I used to download SS to around 6Mpixels (using the downsize functionality in Lightburner), but then I began to wonder whether the buyers of singles and Enhanced licenses would prefer something bigger. So, I stopped the downsize and have a general approach that an image from my Canon 5D MkII would be reduced to 4600 pixels on the long side. That seems to work for all sites and I rarely have rejections for technical reasons.

However, SS does have a very strange view of narrow depth of field - they really like to see a lot of the image in focus, even if it may work artistically or commercially to have a narrower band of focus. No amount of downsizing would make much difference in those cases.

Steve

So does the camera take a shot and the flash doesn't go off, or the camera doesn't take the shot? If you have the lens set to AF and the liveview can't focus (I always focus manually in live view), then the camera won't take the shot because it can't focus. Try going to manual focus on the lens and try again.

Steve

This is not 100% helpful a reply, but I have had the Canon 5D Mks II and III and had no issue with triggering flash in live view. I have used both the ST-E2 trigger as well as a flashgun in the hot shoe triggering other flash guns and never a missed shot.

I don't recall any setting that needed to change (in the camera). You need to make the flashgun the master, although that is independent of the live view bit.

Just to pin the issue down - it works when you are not in live view, but no trigger when live view is activated?

Can you try a flashgun in the socket and see if that works?

Steve