Approved: June 13 2009
500$: March 09 2010 (9 months) (rpd 0.31$, 1119 photos, 1643 downloads)
3000$: March 16 2011 (1 year and 9 months) (rpd 0.40$, 2478 photos, 7447 downloads)
10000$: July 3 2012 (3 years and 20 days) (rpd 0.49$, 3929 photos, 20564 downloads)

Luis - sorry, I must have been taking lots of stock photos, because I completely missed this! Congratulations!! It comes to something when I don't even read my own posts!

Your analysis of Shutterstock earnings was interesting and so I decided to do it for mine:


For those people who create blogs to get referrals, have a look at the 5th column along - $26 from referrals after 4 years of blogging!

I don't know if I am now jinxed, but I have had no EDs at all in July - not a good sign. I've been trying to work out what sort of images get this magic license and posting, each month, my images with an enhanced license. I can guess why some of them get that license, but some are complete mysteries. Here is my latest post: http://www.backyardsilver.com/2012/06/latest-enhanced-license-download-on-shutterstock/

Anyway - here is to our $10K per month earning target!!

Steve

I use Lightroom extensively for both adjusting the exposure/contrast on my images and then adding titles, descriptions and keywords to the images. My approach to keywords is to generally get a common set of keywords that are the bare minimum for a batch and then go through each image in turn and add specific keywords that describe that image. The problem - sometimes I go over 50 keywords, and when I then upload to my 20 or so sites, I have to fiddle about removing keywords from some of the sites before I can finish the uploads. There is a further little issue on some sites in that they accept compound words as one keyword on upload, but when you are above the limit and start to remove the surplus keywords, the compound words suddenly count as individual words again.

Lightroom doesn't have a way of counting keywords, but I found a plugin that does allow you to check if you are under 50 keywords. http://www.lightroomforums.net/archive/index.php/t-13537.html?s=a1d0c56268d256cb4b001cc484cb1370 and have written a more detailed explanation on how to use it (if you have this issue) on my blog at http://www.backyardsilver.com/2012/07/how-to-count-the-number-of-keywords-in-lightroom/

Hope this helps the Lightroom users among you.

Steve

I'm firmly in the "everything goes everywhere" camp. I use Lightburner (great service for this) and upload all my images to that site. They then redistribute to about 20 sites - for some reason Veer and Fotolia don't work from their system and so I also upload (FTP) directly to those sites. I used to downside for Shutterstock in the belief that people wanting a larger image would go and find it elsewhere, but I think that is unlikely, so I upload full sized files to all sites.

Finally, I upload most of the images (ignoring ones that have been rejected at more that one of the first set of sites) to Alamy and do the keywording etc. to get those ones online.

Steve

Looks like I am the first this month - a late evening working on stats has given me the edge (plus it isn't really the end of the month yet!)

I had a great June - easily my best ever. Total earnings came in at around $1750, and I still need to add earnings from Cutcaster and YayMicro which seem to be off the air because of that very bad storm in Northern VA last night. I don't think those two sites will make a great deal of difference though! SS and iStock continue to be very reliable for me, but I sold one image on Veer for $99, and a total of 5 sold on Alamy for a net payment of almost $250. Those made a fantastic difference to the month's totals. Photocase came from nowhere with one sale of $58 this month! I only have 3 images online with that site (all others rejected as being too boring) so it is nice to get an occasional sale there!

More details (and examples of the big sellers) on my blog as usual, but here is the headline graph:


Steve

I now use it all the time - it becomes second nature after a while and certainly stops the autofocus from picking the wrong part of the frame as the key focus point

Steve

although my last set of rejections were for "Long Nails" and I have emailed support for a review of that one

Here it is:



Steve

Each week, hah! try each day bro  I hope you don't get the issues I've been getting with reviewers, very exhausting, as if I don't have enough work already. SS rejecting best selling work, DT being picky about similars and IS rejecting composites. Soon I'll have to built a seperate port for each agency

Like I've said, it's because of guys like you and Louis (to name a few) that I find the courage to keep on going in this business, I thank you for that.

Thanks for this!

On the rejection and strange decisions of the reviewers - I've got to the point where I generally ignore it. I always get a lot of rejections from Fotolia, but as it doesn't impact anything of importance on the site, I just see the rejection emails, smile, and delete them. Rejections from SS annoy me a little more, but I take a deep breath and move on to other things. I very rarely try to correct them, although my last set of rejections were for "Long Nails" and I have emailed support for a review of that one!! I talked about it on my latest examples of stock images taken last week. http://www.backyardsilver.com/2012/06/stock-images-for-june-13-2012/

On the broader topic of helping others - as you all probably know, I don't mind doing that. I learned from others when I started, it is unlikely that someone will find my stock photo examples so incredible that they will copy them, and so I have continued blogging, promoting my book and generally trying to be helpful. I've no idea if it hurts me personally, in the wallet, but it probably makes me feel good!

Steve

One sale of an ED today finally pushed me over the $10K lifetime earnings total on Shutterstock and I get to reap the rewards of 38c per download!!

Its amazing when I look back - in January 2010 I earned $60.91 on Shutterstock, in May 2012, $636. All it takes is endless hard work and the support and ideas of this forum!

Thanks guys...

Steve

Thanks for the update on earnings and have fun with your new toy.

New toy (the Canon G1x) performed quite nicely on a trip to Glen Echo in Maryland. I don't have an auto lens correction profile yet in Lightroom, but there is very little chromatic aberration, and the noise in the shadows is excellent (at 200 ASA). Pretty light and easy to carry (compared to my normal Canon 5D and pack of lenses!) and I'm sure I'll be able to take it to places where I just don't feel like carrying the full kit.

So far, so good. All I need to do now is process and keyword and we will see if any get rejected by our favorite inspectors.

Steve

Well, I think Pixmac is OK! I used to have my images sent there from DepositPhotos and presumably got a few sales less their commission. I moved to a direct contributor in late March, got great support to get my images online, and now see a dribble of sales coming through ($9 so far...). Not great, but for a very low maintenance site it is better than I was getting before. All I have to do is get the images there via Lightburner, visit to add a model release where necessary and sit back. I haven't had a payment yet, but we are slowly getting there.

Steve

I know this sounds like a blatant plug for my book, but I'm constantly amazed how people will spend an inordinate amount of time asking basic questions, searching among the answers to get a reasonable answer, moving on and asking another question, searching another site, all to avoid spending $9.99 on a book that has all these answers and more. Is it that everyone now expects all information to be free and parting with a bit of cash for information is not what the internet is supposed to be about?

Still - I guess we really don't need more competition!

Steve

There is normally some text down around the box where you can put comments for the reviewers. They give you some idea of what is required - usually a model or property release

Steve