DBtale's microstock adventures: Statistics of October

October could not beat September results for me. As a result I am again under $50 in earnings from all the sites in a single month. I have had 133 downloads with no more than 309 images online. The number of downloads has increased a little bit. I have got 29 new accepted images. Since I have started this is the least productive months of mine from the shooting point of view. I only made around half of the submitted images in the recent month. I made the others during August and July, back then I did not have the time to publish all the images I shoot, so now it was time to submit them. If I would not have two OD downloads early in the month Shutterstock would have produced little less money than last month. I wrote about Fotolia's good progress last month, however since then they have slowed down dramatically, maybe because they don't really like my non isolated shots and they were dominant this month. Other interesting observation that most of my earnings from Fotolia and Dreamstime are from the first 5-6 days of the month (at least in my past three months).

Here you can find the details for my report:

Agency	Portfolio size	Downloads	Earnings ($)	Change	Views
Fotolia	294	2 sub, 2 OD	3.05	-65%	982 (down)
Dreamstime	218	3 sub, 4 OD	6.5	-17%	136 (down)
Shutterstock	309	93 sub, 2 OD	27.06	+7%	N/A
iStockPhoto	80	8 OD	4.35	0%	1262 (up)
StockXpert	279	18 sub	5.4	-45%	714 (~)

My multi-site view/download figure is 81 views/download in the month (79 views/download all time). Dreamstime and StockXpert here still contributes a lot. I am now almost sure that Fotolia (245/downs this month, 170 all time) and iStockPhoto (151/downs, 134 all time) counts the number of views of a photo differently.

As I already reported it on my previous statistics page the only agency that I can count on is ShutterStock. However, StockXpert had more frequent downloads, so I could almost count on it two-three times a week. Of course I came too late to StockXpert, because according to other blogs and forums their merger just starts to show its results. So I am still really interested how do my overall sales figure will turn up at the end of the coming months there. For the record here are the details of October: Photos.com Sub 11 and finally Jupiterimages Unlimited sub 7. This seems a definite problem for the future because I read it several times that these two sites will not offer images from StockXpert anymore. Without them I would not even have a single download which is worrying, especially for a site that I have had such high hopes for.

The next paragraph is a recap from last month, unfortunately nothing changed since then, even though the number of accepted photos now are almost reaching 100: I also changed my upload strategy for iStockPhoto because others report sales comparable to ShutterStock there. And I also have surprisingly high rpi there. So now I started to submit all of the photos I have managed to get accepted somewhere. Previously it seemed like they don't like my work, however the newly submitted photos have a quite high acceptance rate for me. The earnings figures however did not change too much.

At the end of this blog entry I put the my total earnings comparison after the end of October. Since I have started at the different agencies at different times I have scaled the earnings down to an average day on each agency. On this figure you can see how much StockXpert gained even in a single month. Also iStockPhoto started to drop a place which is probably because the small amount of photos I have uploaded so far (the new uploads does not seem to catch downloads so fast).