80 dollars, which is an average month for me (around 2000 assets)

One photo sold 11 times, earning 33 dollars, the rest is not interesting.

Oh, and I always hope to sell video (even though I only have a handful of them at istock) to raise my overall RPD. In this case I have one video sale, guess for how much... 13 flippin cents

October was my best month ever at istock with 150 downloads and 99.57 USD earned.
Adobe was close behind with 99.09 and first place goes to shutterstock with 111.06 USD.

Adding some peanuts from other agencies, and my total was 348 dollars, the best result so far on my stock photography journey (ports 2000-2500 assets).

Sometimes I think like: wow, I am doing pretty good, but then seeing some of you people earning as much as 3000/month, and some of you achieving it even with small ports is a very humbling experience for me, and it motivates me to keep improving!

It comes 10 years too late, but yeah... it is appreciated.

108 downloads in March 2024, 69,4 USD, RPD of 0.64

That means a decent month for me.

I got those refunds as well, many... (all for bigger sales). So yeah, totally disastrous month.

How can there be a refund for an image sale? You clearly see what you are buying. The asset can turn out to be misleading (location-wise etc.) then it is justified, but here it wasnt the case. Shall contributors suffer the consequences of someone changing their mind couple of months after they purchased the asset??

I'd say if someone chooses to do pictures/footage for any one of the fake narratives going on being pushed by the media tend to be popular, i.e., "climate change"/"sustainabilty/zero carbon" crap/garbage, "ai/security "threats"", "convid", the "gay/trans" agenda to try and discourage caucasian/western people from having children (have you watched any t.v. recently - is excessive on some channels), etc... if you want to see what narrative/storyline is being pushed - just read any of the stories published on the world economic forum "wef"/un/who/etc...

But aside from those narratives... I'd say it depends/goes in cycles, depends on the type of footage you have/etc...

Hehe, yeah... I am with you on this. I live in Amsterdam (while not being dutch), and seeing all those lgbt flags all over the city (and country) I realize that I could easily cash on it, but I am not doing it, because I couldnt look at myself in the mirror. I am willing to do many things (call electric car eco-friendly in the keywords, while knowing that it is pure bs), but I wont take photos of some rainbow flags or black lives matter, I hope I dont have to say why... there are enough people falling for this, but I am happy to say that winds are changing, and as someone else said "woke-ism" has peaked, and people have enough of that. It is a question of personal integrity. I guess it is already hypocritical enough of me, that I am documenting protests of climate activists, in a way giving them exposure and credibility, while being quite far from agreeing with them and their methods. Anyway, life is a shitshow, and giving too much attention to what is happening in The World detracts from more important things.

When it comes to stock photo/videography, I am a generalist, shooting little bit of everything. I have recently analyzed my top 20 best-sellers across top 3 agencies (AS, IS, SS), to see which topics sell the most. Here are the results, including some specific examples:

1. Environment - Solar panels, green walls, sustainable buildings, pollution, power plants, climate activists
2. Skylines/Cityscapes - interesting vantage points showing general view with good light (sunset)
3. Food - isolated, in hand, typical national dishes etc.
4. Vintage - may not sell that often, but is more likely to bring exceptionally big sale
5. Futuristic architecture, financial buildings, new, modern neighbourhoods

I hope you find this information valuable. Now, if there are other generalists out there, please feel free to share what sells for you (if you are comfortable with revealing it) I love the idea of discovering new topics I would be capable of covering (like when I attented protests the first time, struggled a lot with both the atmosphere and the settings of my camera, but eventually improved to the point that I sold couple of shots and even videos, and became much more confident in reportage subgenre)

All the best! Devotio

September 71 sales, 43 dollars.

positive: one video sale for 11 dollars for a really old and really boring file.

Didn�t upload anything, I hope I get a nice batch up this month.

We have very similar stats. I had 74 sales, but only 35.75 USD. Lack of big sales in September resulting in being around 25% down compared to August.

Good month for me, istock beating adobe, and my 3rd best month at istock in general.
I wanted to see the details of what sold and for how much (in a clear way), but todayis20 is down, which sucks...

I never really understood the site... Owned by shutterstock, smaller image database, and even seasoned contributors make only few bucks per month with them at best.
Why would any buyer go to bigstock instead of shutterstock? I assume that shutterstock must have some profit-oriented strategy to keep BS alive, which is beyond my understanding.

A decent month. I got RPD of 0.51 which is low, but at least I see a nice trend of istock keeping up with SS and AS whe it comes to earnings, which was not the case few months ago.

Quote from: Devotio777 on March 20, 2023, 08:34

I got the same email today as well. This agency has always been very low earner for me, so I am thinking about deleting my port.
Please let us now Firn if you got any response from them.

I got a reply. It just said "You were removed from the joining revenue share model". Nothing more. No explanation why I even ended up in this.

But by now I have deactivated all my files and I intend to keep them deactivated at least for now.

I don't like any of this. I don't like this joining revenue share model where Depositphotos always gets the same 60% of all earnings, but contributors have to share the remaining 40% with each file downloaded and the more customers download images the less we get while our images are on a "take all you can eat buffet" that encourages customers to download as many as possible, if not even all so we end up getting scraps. I strongly believe our share for each image downloaded will end up being something in the $0.000X range.
I don't like how I was just put into this model after making it clear I was not interested. I don't like how there is no explanation or apology.
Depositphotos just isn't eraning me enoughto put up with this.

Yeah, I completely understand you. Once you think it cant get much worse, they come up with some new method to screw contributors over even more.
I have just noticed that at my sellers menu at DP there is a Revenue Share column that I didnt notice before, but it still says: NO.
Maybe they didnt update it for me yet, and I am just about to leave for holiday, but I will keep an eye on it, and will probably follow your example - email them to be excluded from the program.