Position pretty good but earnings down at lowest in 6 weeks with a much lower RPD... 

Down 15.6% on Feb 2023, up 20% on Feb 2024 and up 36% on last month Jan 2025.

This year has been awful on Shutterstock generally.

At this time of year earnings for 2025 are down at just 44% of earnings in 2023 and 53% of earnings in 2024 (photos and video). Vast majority of these income falls are video.

RPD for video this year so far is $6.79 and for March is $5.67. But again much of the overall fall in earnings is not just RPD but falling sales volumes.   

Lol - where is everyone's daily rankings?!??!?!?!

I was enjoying those! Please start posting again! It was informative, and I liked seeing how other people were performing as well... cheers!

When do we get to have a peek at yours? You get to have a peek at ours.

Shutterstock - earnings fell below $100 for the first time since April 2022 when I had a video port at least 5x smaller that it is now.

Shutterstock - a 11-day consecutive period of non-video sales not seen since... oh also April 2022... when I had a video port at least 5x smaller that it is now.

Also to mention multiple pathetic $1 video sales when they did sell.

Adobe Stock did very well for February 2025.

Overall earnings were lowest + first time under $1k month since January 2024 and if not for a late sale of $117.90 on Pond5 would of been lowest since March 2023.

A poor month with exception of Adobe Stock which performed well.   
   

 

And if it takes 500 good useful videos uploaded to each agency every month to see a sustainable increase in income then it will take 5000 good useful images uploaded to each agency every month to see a sustainable increase in income. It's even worse for images with more competition from ai, easy of copycats, much more saturation. So with that in mind, I'd say within the next year or two, you're going to need upwards of 10000 good useful images uploaded to each agency every month to see a sustainable increase in income. Keep rowing men!       

I arrived at the 500 videos a month for pro income from reading around various groups and personal recommendation from someone doing lots of video, or stock in general full time.

If it is possible to significantly raise my income with just 100 clips a month?! Then I am doing something wrong and should quickly change my strategy!! I have a lot of unprocessed videos, but still putting images/Adobe first.

I can definitely affirm that 2023 and prior years, you could very easily indeed see income increases with 100 videos uploaded each month. By that I mean 100 fresh video clips which (for the sake of clarification) uploaded to four agencies and all accepted, would be 400 video uploads in the month. Whether that is what those contributors on other groups intended to mean but from my experience, there were certain and significant income growth from uploading the number videos as above. Thanks for sharing your stats... it looks like steady and noticeable increased earnings there.   

Yes I got that email as well. It is intentionally ambiguous and I don't think they mean actual pixel by pixel duplicats in my own port.

I think they are going after people who upload the exact same images to several different ports. Or the people that buy a "ready made" set of ai images, fully keyworded... but are not aware that the same set is being sold to hundreds of people.

And maybe also the near identical ai images that are being constantly uploaded because people use the exact same prompt on the exact same image generator.

Or they feed adobe bestsellers into the generators for near exact duplication.

I do think in principle it is a good move, but I am concerned.

Even with the best intentions...if there is a hunter duplicate algo software, who knows what it fines???

I also have many similar or identical titles - Easter bunny with easter eggs...if they get flagged because of similar titles, my port might die...

Yes agree, and good points with regard to the bold text. This I would be very supportive of actually.

Cobalt,

Interesting assessment of your situation. Thanks for sharing your story.

Yes paying rent / mortgage is expensive and very expensive here in south Sydney where I live. My capacity for uploading is limited as I work a full-time job, though fortunately in the public service where conditions and retirement employer contributions are very good. However working full-time is a drag. Anyway yes that was 2000 - 2700 since November 2021 to each of the four ports I should add.

The thing is, this worked really well especially in 2023 and slowed down noticeably in 2024, and has slowed further in 2025. Shutterstock in particular has just about collapsed... at least in terms of earnings. So the challenge of diminished / falling earnings is something I can't keep up with as I don't have the time to upload as much as may be needed in the current stock environment.

Another risk I feel is Adobe Stock's auditing of portfolios to remove what they identify as duplicates. I got the email. Nothing in my port is necessarily a duplicate but rather a series of clips from (mainly) aerial drone shoots. So have to see how this plays out.         

Trading today below IPO.

a lot of people think i am crazy to attempt getting back to a full time income. and maybe they are right, we will see?

Cobalt, do you really believe you'll be able to return to a full time income?

I've never thought I could make a full time income or living from microstock but I did think I'd be able to make something half-decent like a minimum of $1000 per month and occasional $2000 plus... hence uploading 2000 to 2700+ videos to four agencies over the past three years. But now with the way things are heading in this industry, I'm not even confident I'll see any sustained increased income in the future.     

Good, long  story Peter. But even Cobalt who is doing a seriously effort doesn't get further then like $100 a week (at least last week it seems like that). Maybe $200 0r $300 a week when luck is her way? That is not enough in the western world we live in to get bills paid. Unless you have wellfare on the side and don't report income.
Maybe ZeroTalent has enough income to come by (haven't heard from him for a while now though). But otherwise it seems pretty useless to pursue a living from Microstock no matter what history there was how we got to this point in time.

Navigate to page 25 https://www.microstockgroup.com/general-stock-discussion/this-month's-sales/600/ and see  Reply #615 on: February 01, 2025, 22:58.