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« on: March 08, 2016, 07:29 »
Hi guys,
After months of passive readings of this forum I decided to register.
I wrote down "newbie" with quotes cause in fact I have an account on Dreamstime, Shutterstock and Istock since 2013 but at that time I had not yet taken microstock seriously.
I started working on it only in July of 2015. Without any pretense, and with all the humility of which I am capable I started to fill tax forms, send ids, learning how to post process a picture for microstock standards and even learned how to indexing as good as possibile. Learned to find some niche and a lot of other useful things.
For the first month (and an half) it was just a matter of hard (and annoying) work, but then I started to earn something (less than 10usd\month) and now I am slowly growing.
I closed february with 66usd and my actual average income is 40+ usd\month (sometimes less, sometimes more).
I am not complain about that, I started this thing knowing that the market is saturated and the royalities and the sales are not the same as 10 years ago.
I contribute with 10 agencies (for now). My average for my portfolios are 400 pictures (photos only, no vectors). Considering che number of the images my low expectations I can say that microstock for me is, actually a good paid hobby and a little (but growing) monthly income.
So, thank you guys and experts posting on this forum cause it gave me some great advices when I started this little activity 6 months ago and still give me useful informations even now.
Last but not least: Microstock is an awersome photography school for me. It force me to be REALLY critic about my pictures. In past I got tons of followers on social platforms like 500px or Flickr but "likes" and "favs" are not good to learn as a frustrating evil shutterstock curator ;P .
Oh , and my personal chart is the following:
-Shutterstock (still the best of the best, 40%+ of my incomes with tiny portfolio than others agencies).
-Fotolia (growing really fast, love it. This is the only SS contender )
-Istock (most of sales are from partner sites and subs but is not bad, I like theyre indexing client)
-123rf (chaotic indexing system in my opinion and royalities are lower the than average)
-Dreamstime (I love DT cause this was my first approach to microstock in 2013 but sadlysales are really really fewI hope they will resume soon)
-BigStock ( the SS bad company gives me modest but constants monthly sales)
-DepositPhotos (same as Bigstock, few sales but constant)
Worst of all
-CanStockPhotos (no sales in 3 months )
-Pond 5 (just one sale from augustI read that theyre awersome for footages but hey, in my experience they are severe on accepting, just 280 allowed here, and sales on pictures really suck!)
-Photodune ( I started from 2 months but I HATE theyre indexing system so much that I still have only 11 pics on portfolio)
\
you have other agencies that you would recommend to go on in this adventure?
Im about to drop Photodune and maybe also CanStock (the only reason I still upload is cause they have probably the more fast indexing system ever2 clicks away to send to curator) and I am searching some decent low earner like bigstock of deposit...
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