DBtale's microstock adventures: Statistics of November

November has had slightly better results than October, but it was still far away from September's bonanza. These results are mostly coming from the almost identical month at Shutterstock and BMEs from Dreamstime and iStockphoto. But I am still under $50 in earnings from all the sites in a single month. I have had 130 downloads with no more than 333 images online. The number of downloads has decreased a little bit. I have got 26 new accepted images. Since I have started this is the least productive months of mine from the shooting point of view. This month I tried to produce more images, so I have almost reached my upload average. My PPD at Fotolia has drastically fallen to the previously unseen level of July, as a result I have sold more photos than I did in October but I have earned less. 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 more than half of my monthly earnings from Fotolia and Dreamstime occurred at the first 5-6 days of the month (at least in my past four months).

Here you can find the details for my report:

Agency	Portfolio size	Downloads	Earnings ($)	Change	Views
Fotolia	310	4 sub, 2 OD	2.8	-7%	1219 (up)
Dreamstime	247	6 sub, 4 OD	7.97	+22%	123 (down)
Shutterstock	333	95 sub, 2 OD	26.54	-2%	N/A
iStockPhoto	114	1 sub, 5 OD	6.46	+48%	1281 (~)
StockXpert	305	10 sub, 1 OD	3.5	-35%	1098 (up)

My multi-site view/download figure is 113 views/download in the month (86 views/download all time). This figure has also suffered a major increase mainly because of StockXpert. I am now almost sure that Fotolia (203/downs this month, 175 all time) and iStockPhoto (213/downs, 132 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, in the past months StockXpert seemed like it can become the second stable earner. Of course I came too late to StockXpert, because my majority of my earnings was coming from Photos.com and Jupiterimages Unlimited subscription sales. Since the removal of Photos.com my sales figures has almost halved. So I am still really interested whether the StockXpert sales alone would result similar sales. For the record here are the details of November: Photos.com Sub 5, Jupiterimages Unlimited sub 5 and finally I have got a single StockXpert OD sale. This seems a definite problem after they also remove Jupiterimages sales. Without these sites I would barely have a single download. This is worrying, especially for a site that I have had such high hopes for.

My strategy of uploading to iStockphoto all my work accepted by other agencies finally seems to starts paying. This month was BME and the number of downloads also reached a number where the earnings seem to become more sustainable. My portfolio at iStock have just passed the 100 accepted photos. Previously it seemed like they don't like my work, however the newly submitted photos have a quite high acceptance rate for me.

At the end of this blog entry I put the my total earnings comparison after the end of November. 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 that agencies except ShutterStock started to get equalized results. If Fotolia does not catch up soon it will be hardly enough to catch up with the now decreasing sales volume of StockXpert. This month I have not seen any movement in the ranking, however iStockphoto starts to reach StockXpert and soon it will be again second in my stats.