Take the income that you earned in a month at a site and divide it by the number of images you have there. That's your RPI. Do several months to get an average. Add up your RPI for each site and that is your total RPI. Then, you can calculate roughly how many images you need to reach your goal and which sites are more profitable to upload to. It's not a straight shot, and you'll probably need to make adjustments along the road. But, it is a better indicator than other people's numbers. Other people's figures can be inspiring, but they don't necessarily apply to you.

I find the poll results pretty inaccurate (especially as a vector artist). Take what everybody else says with a grain of salt and try things out for yourself.

I apply the formula: don`t buy at istock, don`t sell at istock.

Istock is an abusive system.
If you buy at istock, you support an abusive system.
If you upload to istock, you support a abusive system.
If you are an exclusive artist at istock you give your name and all your creativity to an abusive system. Nothing to be proud of, buth rather ashamed.
Simple and clear.

That's a good philosophy, but where does it stop? Does it extend to FT, DT, SS? There are very few agencies that I think have got it right.

Not to call shenanigans, but this Pixmac thing is still a mystery to me. Everyone says they canceled their partnership, but my images there have increased since January.

Russel work still unavaliable. Must be something very serious.

Yeah, I noticed Google had reindexed too, so his iStock profile doesn't show up with a search anymore. I guess it is none of my business, but I'm still curious.

In fairness to cthoman, I've also had assistants from SVA and clients from Pratt, and they were very well educated. And they knew the subway system- always a plus 

Hey, I didn't go to those schools, so no insult to me. I went to the clown school in Florida. I just hear those mentioned as some of the best schools in the country, but New Yorkers like to throw around the word "best" a lot too. 

That is all just ... odd.  Maybe he has a relative that was killed by a micro loser photographer or something.

Mauled by a wildlife photographer.

I did learn something though. Apparently, there are only 10 photographers that earn a living with microstock. 

That makes sense. Ringling's Fine Art program wasn't as strong as the Computer animation or Illustration. Although, I graduated about 13 years ago, so I'm sure a lot has changed.

Why not concentrate on Shutterstock and Dreamstime until you have a big enough portfolio to get more sales on the smaller sites?  I'm not saying we should all dump istock for the small sites that don't have sales but I'm sure if we just carry on as normal with istock things will just get worse.

As an illustrator, iStock (despite the low royalties) still pays 2 to 3 times more per sale than DT or FT and about 5 or 6 times more than SS. So, I don't really see why I should treat them any different than any other agency. That said, I've stopped uploading to all the big 4, and ditched FT. None of them are growing very much anyway, so I figured I'd focus on some smaller agencies and my own stuff.

Sorry but these changes are shafting everyone. Of course there's also no way of opting out of subs at Dreamstime, or deleting all your content if you're not happy with the changes because your portfolio is locked in for 6 months.

You have to think it won't work out for them very well either. It's pretty easy to download all 10 in a day. Which could easily mean they'll make very little or lose money on each transaction.

OK, now DT is down. Now, that is funny. 

It's definitely surprising to see. Hopefully, it's not "abusive inspiration" like claimed in the article.

I've always admired IS's "abusive inspiration" policy though. People may have gotten unfairly burned by it, but it's good to have a policy that states that something doesn't have to be a direct copy to be a copy. Especially for those that dip into the "inspiration" well too many times.