Sat - March 1, 2008

Microstock Photography Earnings Results for February 2008



South Platte River at iStock February was my third month with microstock photography. I was spending more time shooting outdoors including paddling trips and producing fewer product shots. I started to photograph some industrial and construction scenes which, probably, wouldn't happen without microstock on my mind.

Here is a report from my portfolio performance at different microstock agencies. The number of pictures is reported at the end of February while the number of downloads and earning are for the entire month. The acceptance rate is calculated for the entire submission period, not for the last month. The return per image would be somewhat higher if I use the the average number of pictures instead of one at the end of month. I am continuously adding pictures to all portfolios, but with focusing more on iStock.

Links in the table below are my associate links. You are welcome to use them if you are ready to join one of these microstock agencies.

agency number of files acceptance downloads earnings return per image

iStock

97 55.4% 25 $26.67 0.27

Fotolia

 102 59.0% 13 $5.94 0.06

DreamsTime

 93 57.4% 4 $3.0 0.03

Big Stock Photo

 104 78.8% 1 $2.00 0.02

123rf

 125 95.4% 2 0.88 0.01

Lucky Oliver

 131 91% 1 1.20 0.01

FeaturePics

 57 100% 0 0 0.00

The iStock portfolio is the only one performing according to my expectations. It shows a perfectly linear growth over the last three months concerning the number of files, downloads and earnings. Extrapolating this growth to the end of 2008, I should have 400 files in the portfolio, 111 downloads and $128 of earnings per month. My total earnings from iStock are right now close to $50, so the first payment in the next couple of months starts to look realistic.

My goal is to achieve a higher than linear growth in my iStock portfolio. Of course, the obvious solution is to shoot better and more salable pictures. However, I can also build my portfolio faster. My acceptance rate at iStock in February was about 70% with only one "no resubmit" refusal. I am resubmitting most of the refused images taking care of "artifacts" and "overfiltering" complaints by reducing amount of Photoshop adjustments and/or reducing the picture size. However, I am still wasting a lot of my upload limit of 15 pictures per week. I am looking forward to reach next canister level with 20 images/week after 250 downloads which may happen sometime in the middle of 2008 according to my linear growth model.

The Fotolia portfolio is also showing some growth. Actually, the earnings are growing faster than the portfolio size, but numbers are still pretty low. My experience with Fotolia in February was quite frustrating since they are rejecting nearly all my outdoor shots and many close-ups due to "type of photograph." alfalfa sprouts at iStock So, my acceptance rate went down to below 50%. The same image can be accepted or rejected for this reason. I discovered a small logo in one of my accepted pictures. I deleted the picture from Fotolia, removed that logo, and submitted it again with a explanation note to the editor. The picture was rejected!

DreamsTime is also rejecting many of my pictures already accepted and selling at iStock due to some unclear technical reasons or more fairly due to "this is not quite what we are looking for." Other portfolios saw only some single sales. I downloaded some pictures to FeaturePics as an experiment.

I got my monthly regular rejection from StockXpert: "At the moment we are not looking for pictures as the ones you uploaded". Each time I am uploading quite different pictures there. And, next week, it will be time for another submission attempt to ShutterStock.

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