DBtale's microstock adventures: Statistics of January

January has suffered a major setback in earnings for me. The saver of the month was iStockphoto where I have had my new BME. Shutterstock was falling even further in earnings. And this month both Dreamstime and Fotolia was performing so badly that I have not seen this bad sales since last June-July. I have had 82 downloads with no more than 371 images online. The number of downloads has decreased significantly since December because of the fall of Shutterstock. I have got 20 new accepted images. This month I have made only two new series, both were short ones. I have seen quite high interest about my Pécs series that covers 2010's European cultural capital. So I also decided to add some further images to my portfolio about Pécs. Shutterstock performed so badly again that it has lost the monthly crown for the second time I have been selling stock photos. But instead of Dreamstime this time the crown went to iStockphoto with a large margin.

Here you can find the details for my report:

Agency	Portfolio size	Downloads	Earnings ($)	Change	Views
Fotolia	336	1 sub, 4 OD	3.8	-76%	1275 (up)
Dreamstime	276	5 sub, 2 OD	3.54	-82%	110 (up)
Shutterstock	371	50 sub, 2 OD	16.26	-11%	N/A
iStockPhoto	197	18 OD	25.45	+109%	2938 (up)
StockXpert	344	NONE	0	-100%	2650 (up)

My multi-site view/download figure is 232 views/download in the month (113 views/download all time). This figure has also suffered a major increase mainly because of StockXpert, where I have seen an unprecedented increase in views that did not result downloads at all. iStockphoto made a huge comeback by lowering its 340 views/download figure from the past month to an almost average 163 views/download.

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, however this time it seems iStockphotos good performance might lead to a second regular performer. My strategy of uploading to iStockphoto all my work accepted by other agencies finally seems to starts paying because of the steady growth of earnings since last August. My portfolio at iStock have almost reached the 200th accepted photo. Previously it seemed like they don't like my work, however the newly submitted photos have a quite high acceptance rate for me (around 80%).

Unfortunately it seems like even though I have had high hopes for StockXpert they started to drop in earnings and this month they have reached the unprecedented 0 donwloads. This low amount of sales did not happen since I have started to upload to them... Last month I decided that unless they start to bring some "significant" money in soon, I will not even upload to them anymore. I beleive this will be the case if they are not going to sell anything in Febryary.

At the end of this blog entry I put my total earnings comparison after the end of January. Since I have started at the different agencies at different times I have scaled the earnings down to an average day on each agency in its past year. On this figure you can see that agencies except ShutterStock started to get equalized results. As a result of December's bonanza at Dreamstime and Fotolia, they postponed iStockphoto to achieve its awaited second place till this month. My overall ranking however seems to get really unstable for the bottom _three_ places because their daily earnings are really close (the difference between the lowest and the highest ranked agencies is just over 30%). In the coming months I hope these agencies will get more stable earners, as a result they will be more stable in ranking.