March was really good for my microstock photography. With four months of data I can start plotting the results. In the table below I included "return per image" and "sell-through rate." They are calculated using portfolio size at the month end.

The major achievements in March was getting finally accepted by Shutterstock four attempts and reaching the first payment from iStockphoto. So, now I can divide my microstock portfolios into four groups with different performance:

1. iStockphoto and Shutterstock preforming really well - 77.0% of total earnings
2. Fotolia and Dreamstime with growing sales - 18.7%
3. Big Stock Photo and 123RF with just a few sales - 4.7%
4. Lucky Oliver and FeaturePics without any sales at all

Observations:

• I got three extended licences: SS, IS, and FT.
• I was focusing in March on building a portfolio at Shutterstock. My acceptance rate at SS after initial rejections stays around 86%. I resubmitted several pictures which were rejected in my initial submissions for technical reasons or low commercial value. There were all accepted and are selling OK.
• The iStock portfolio was performing much better even without EL than I could expect a month earlier. I can see a better than linear growth of earnings with the portfolio size. I managed to contribute only 30 pictures in March. They have really long review time recently.
• I collected another rejection (4th!) from StockXpert: "At the moment we are not looking for pictures as the ones you uploaded". Maybe, they really do not like my pictures ...

Some other websites reporting monthly earnings from microstock: Microstock Diaries, Microstock Experiment, NiltoMil, jrtb. Anybody else?

Related posts:

• Microstock Photography Earnings for
  July 2008, June 2008, May 2008, April 2008, March 2008, February 2008 and January 2008
• First $100 Earnings from My iStockphoto Portfolio
• What Sells in Microstock? My List of Picture Bestsellers
• How to Get Accepted by ShutterStock? Don't Give Up!