DBtale's microstock adventures: January 2010

December became my BME so far, thanks to the BMEs at iStockphoto, Dreamstime and Fotolia. The past month became BME even though my Shutterstock income suffered a major breakdown. I have had 101 downloads with no more than 355 images online. The number of downloads has decreased significantly since November because of the fall of Shutterstock. I have got 22 new accepted images. This month I have made only two new series, so I lowered my upload average a little bit, however this month I have reached my best acceptance ratio so far (for example I have had only a single rejection at Dreamstime). PPD has peaked at all agencies this month. I have had two series of sales at Dreamstime and also at Fotolia. Without these sales Dreamstime would have closed an above average month, meanwhile Fotolia would have seen troubles again. In case of Dreamstime one of my images just reached the second level. Shutterstock performed so badly that it has lost the monthly crown for the first time I have been selling stock photos. Therefore in December the best earner agency of the month is Dreamstime.

Here you can find the details for my report:

Agency	Portfolio size	Downloads	Earnings ($)	Change	Views
Fotolia	324	4 OD, 4EL	15.3	+446%	1193 (~)
Dreamstime	270	2 sub, 12 OD	19.18	+140%	97 (down)
Shutterstock	355	62 sub, 2 OD	18.24	-31%	N/A
iStockPhoto	150	8 OD	12.12	+87%	2726 (up)
StockXpert	324	7 sub	2.1	-40%	1361 (up)

My multi-site view/download figure is 145 views/download in the month (96 views/download all time). This figure has also suffered a major increase mainly because of iStockPhoto, where I have seen an unprecedented increase in views that did not result downloads. As an opposite Dreamstime made a league of its own by breaking the 7 view/download barrier in December.

As I already reported it on my previous statistics page the only agency that I can count on is ShutterStock. This is still the case. Unfortunately it seems like even though I have had high hopes for StockXpert they started to drop in earnings and now they are cancelling most of my income from them by dropping subscriptions entirely. They suggested that if I would like to have subscription sales then they would cut the already low fixed rate of 0.3 to 0.25. This drop does not seem to be bad on first sight in my case since Shutterstock subs earn the same amount for me today, however at Shutterstock I have perspective. So I have opted out from the new subscription model of SXP, and I also decided that unless they start to bring some "significant" money in soon I will not even upload to them anymore.

My strategy of uploading to iStockphoto all my work accepted by other agencies finally seems to starts paying. This month was BME but the number of downloads did not change even though I have uploaded quite a lot to them. My portfolio at iStock have just passed the 150 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. As a result of this months bonanza at Dreamstime and Fotolia, they really get a boost, and even though I thought iStockphoto is going to climb to the second place this month, it did not happen because of the strong competition from Dreamstime. My overall ranking however seems to get really unstable for the bottom _four_ places because their daily earnings are really close (the difference between the lowest and the highest ranked agencies is just 15%). In the coming months I hope these agencies will get more stable earners, as a result they will be more stable in ranking.