Interesting reading. What kind of concerns me is how not one contributor with a port size of 5001 to 10000 files is able to make more than $5000 per month. Thought there might of been at least one or more. It would be insightful to see what contents (photos / illustrations / videos etc) make up those larger ports. 

Here's my weekly rank as it stands this morning...

ETA I'll trade your sales volume and position with my RPD. Let's go!

This year 2024 I had Firefly bonus on Adobe in September, dataset earnings on Pond5 in April and November, and contributor funds on Shutterstock in January, March and May. Now the agencies have effectively 'trained' (copied) the assets for their programs they no longer need to keep paying contributors. One small $ step for contributor, one giant $$$$$$$$$$ leap for microstock agencies.   

ETA apologies just realised the original post was specifically regarding Deposit Photos.

Quote from: Pacesetter on December 27, 2024, 03:56

Interesting perspectives.

Bauman I recall you do quite well with regular microstock? You offer photos and video?

Yes, I am full time. But I only sell photos with microstock, no videos.

Unfortunately in the last two years I have lost 25% of my annual earnings. And now I can no longer afford to lose earnings, otherwise I will have to go back to doing microstock part-time  . 2025 will be very important for me.

I have always focused on the quality of my content and this has worked for 15 years. I have always uploaded 300/400 images per year of the highest quality, and this has allowed me to be full-time for many years. Now this does not seem to work anymore.

Halfway through this year I changed some strategies. I increased the quantity at the cost of losing a bit of quality ... let's see if it works.

Selling prints contributes only about 10% of my earnings. Maybe I haven't done a good job of marketing in these years; I should have worked more on the blog than on social media. But I can say that selling prints with European content is much more difficult.

Well being able to do this full-time is a remarkable achievement and especially so without video. What size generally are your portfolios?   

Quote from: AM24 on December 23, 2024, 11:59

There's an old marketing rule that says, when faced with an oversaturated market, there are two options. You either go up or you go down. (Sell Rolex's or sell copy watches). But don't stay in the middle. Its the middle ground that will be eroded.

Very well said!
For my part, I'm trying to go up. Actually already since 2020, when SS cut royalties and I left them. Which in my case means doing social media, selling prints, licensing content directly to customers and so on. It took some time to get going, but this year I was able to outperform my previous best year (2016) by over 30%, while my earnings from microstock fell to around 50% of 2016's level.

Mike,

What are you doing on social media?

How is your selling prints going and do you use the POD sites (ie: FAA etc)?

Just received an email from Steve Heap (Backyard Silver) and he shares some impressive updates on his sales on POD sites showing significant growth each year. Link to the article on his website below.   

https://backyardsilver.com/update-on-my-fine-art-approach/   

Annie, really great to see you back and posting! I hope things are going well for you. 

Just passed the $1k income for December 2024 which at this time of year with summer slump and all in Australia, is a really good outcome to finish the year on. December and January are my slowest months of the year. The other good result from this is that there were no unusually high $$$ sales, just better regular $$ sales. 

Even Shutterstock did a lot better in Dec 24 compared to Dec 23 with a 58% increase on earnings for the month (though the 2024 calendar year is still way down) and an RPD of $4.21 in 24 vs $2.11 in 23.

This marks 11 months of 2024 (Feb to Dec) where I made over $1k for the month. 

Nothing improving here and rejections are getting ridiculous. Adobe's review process is the worst of all places I submit to. 

While earnings were 26% below last month, they were over 8% higher than November 2023 and the best November so far. According to the exported results, video RPD was $3.80 and photo RPD was $0.67.

I think we are now getting to the phase where my rank improves even if my sales are steady or even slower, because overall things are now starting to slow down. By Dec 20th we enter the death zone, that lasts until January 15th. At least that is the way it has been for me in the past.

pos 634, files 7200

Very good! Though I take your word for your sales activity being ordinary because it looks great to me. I'm right in the middle of the summer slump here in Australia, probably not helped by really good summer weather. Double whammy here, we have the summer slump and Christmas holiday converging. But looking at your results is encouraging to see there is still a lot of gold in them thar hills.

Have to say I am not as optimistic about 2025 as I have been in previous years looking forward to the new year. That said, I have not given up and am continuing to upload.

Just generally, compared to 2023, this year 2024 has seen a big fall in earnings on Shutterstock and a smaller fall in earnings on Pond5. iStock has shown a modest rise in earnings in 2024 while Adobe Stock has seen a huge rise in earnings. The end-of-year fall off in terms of earnings has been earlier, faster and further.

Still I did reach some goals with every month since February to November achieving >$1k per month. I just passed my total 2023 earnings earlier this month but must be considered in light of uploading over 500 videos to each 4 portfolios this year, and over 2000 to 2500 to each 4 ports since November 2021.

I just hope 2025 doesn't see a greater fall in contributor earnings overall though I do acknowledged the exceptional performance of Adobe Stock many of us seen this year.       

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