February has became my second best month in earnings for me. I have had 101 downloads with no more than 381 images online. Even though the number of downloads raised a little it is still far away from the record of last August. I have got 10 new accepted images, this is the lowest amount since I have started microstock. These ten images were mainly related to easter, but I also made a few on the current local festival.I have got my first extended license sale at Shutterstock. Without this sale this month would have been even worse than the previous one. With the extended license sale at Shutterstock I have got a new BME there since last August. Shutterstock was gaining a little momentum over last month with an extra 10 sales even further in earnings. I was hoping better consistency at iStockphoto, however my sales dropped dramatically there from the BME in January, I hope this is not going to be a trend. Based on the earnings results iStockphoto has even lost its monthly crown against Shutterstock. Dreamstime has sold 17 files in a short month that is a new record there, however these sales are either subscriptions or one credit sales so the BME of december seems far away. As for Fotolia I cannot say any good news, its already bad performance has degraded even further.
Here you can find the details for my report:
| Agency | Portfolio size | Downloads | Earnings ($) | Change | Views |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fotolia | 345 | 4 sub, 3 OD | 2.55 | -33% | 1296 (~) |
| Dreamstime | 291 | 15 sub, 2 OD | 5.81 | +64% | 218 (up) |
| Shutterstock | 381 | 64 sub, 1 OD, 1EL | 45.88 | +182% | N/A |
| iStockPhoto | 235 | 11 OD | 13.03 | -49% | 3292 (up) |
My multi-site view/download figure is 137 views/download in the month (116 views/download all time). Since I reporting this number this is the first time it decreases significantly. This is mainly because of the high amount of sales at Dreamstime. iStockphoto is back to the league of 300 views/download. Fotolia has barely changed in this figure. As an opposite Dreamstime has almost doubled the number of views on my portfolio, so their views/download figure has been increasing a little.
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 iStockphoto could be a good performer even though its fall this month (they are still in the second best earner position with a large margin). My strategy of uploading to iStockphoto all my work accepted by other agencies finally seems to starts paying. My portfolio at iStock have almost reached the 250th accepted photo. In the middle of the month I have already predicted that my earnings would drop significantly at iStockphoto, thus I figured I need some new technique on attract buyers. This new technique is the introduction of my thematic private lightboxes that are referred from all the images they hold. I plan to introduce these lightboxes in this blog soon. They are still in their youth however I can see that they are already generating some further clicks.
At the end of this blog entry I put my total earnings comparison after the end of February. 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. iStockphoto is a little bit stronger than Fotolia or Dreamstime but the difference is still small compared to the overall result of Shutterstock. Trends of the past three-four months show that I am probably going to have the ranking stabilized as I have it today.
So here is my current agency ranking:- ShutterStock (-)
- iStockPhoto (-)
- Dreamstime (-)
- Fotolia (-)
