Recently I was invited by ‘Stock Performer‘ to open an account before they officially launch at the Microstock Expo this Saturday. So here is a short review of what they offer.

This microstock analytics site gives a great overview of your important stats all in one place. Currently 4 microstock sites are included, Shutterstock, Dreamstime, iStockphoto and Fotolia. If you love to press the F5 button on the stat pages on these sites to see what has been sold, then Stock Performer may be something you would like. You can see all your recent downloads with thumbnail images of the images sold, you can also see in a graph the total amount of images you have online with these agencies, the amount of downloads you have and also your earnings, from the time you started microstock until the current day.

There is also a Top Sales section. Below is an example showing the first few Top Sales for my own images on Dreamstime for February and March.

By clicking on one of the images there is further analyses, as shown below.

You also have the ability to see analytics for any collection or lightbox that you have on any of these sites (data read is only for your images). Stock Performer does not require your passwords, it automatically retrieves your sales data when you log in to your agencies and updates every hour, or you can update the stats whenever you like.

Stock Performer will initially have a controlled launch and users will receive a free 14 day trial (actual prices not announced yet). If you would like to be included you can send an email to this address info@stockperformer.com However, as it is a controlled launch, initially they are not accepting everyone, but if you are reading this before their launch on November 5, then you’ve certainly got a better chance of being the first few to use Stock Performer. I’ve only had a short time to play around with this and my initial impression is that it is pretty useful, as well as seeing the basic stats that we all need, it is also a way of being able analyse image performance across the sites. I like the interface and ease of use, everything seems to be logically placed and its simplicity is very appealing. I currently don’t think it is as comprehensive as Microstock Analytics, which I reviewed in July, but Microstock Analytics has improved since it was launched and I’m sure Stock Performer will continually improve and increase its features too.

All in all though, it’s a great tool and I would recommend trying to secure your spot for the first few accounts, so you can try it out. Here’s the email again info@stockperformer.com

Related posts:

1. Discover Microstock Analytics
2. Istock’s loss is Shutterstock’s gain

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Wow! 3 Extended license sales on Shutterstock in 5 days. For each one of these sales my share is $28. Prior to these 3, I had only received 2 Extended license sales on Shutterstock and considering I currently only have 163 files online with them, I think I’m fortunate to get any at all.

Thanks to the buyers whoever they are and congratulations Shutterstock, “you’re still my agent.”

Update October 6, 2011: Just got another. El licenses are usually rare, so it’s great to be getting them this often. And from what I’ve read in forums, I’m not the only one who is seeing an increase of these sales.

Related posts:

1. Discover Microstock Analytics
2. Pre-Launch Review of Stock Performer Analytics

A new site launched recently called Microstock Analytics. I signed up not long after it launched. I’ve not had comprehensive analytics for my ports since iSyndica closed, and I kind of missed seeing my sales stats from various microstock sites configured in one place. However, iSyndica’s primary function was for syndicating files and not its stats. Microstock Analytics is for those who want to know exactly how much they are earning and what kind of images, or shoots are working for them. I will show you a few examples of what it can do.

A few years ago I had a hold up with my work visa for Indonesia, I was supposed to pick up the visa in Singapore, but once I got there I was told that it wouldn’t be ready for at least week. I wasn’t going to hang around a big and expensive city for a week, so I got a flight to Phnom Penh in Cambodia and basically enjoyed an unexpected holiday in the country.

On Microstock Analytics I can find out the analytics for all the images I have or for groups of images, one method is to use keywords, so I typed in ‘Cambodia’ to see the results. Below are thumbnails of 23 outstanding images (I’m biased) from this keyword search, which made it on to the big four agencies (mostly in 2008 and 2009). Further below is a bar chart showing how much these images have earned per month, so far this year. There are various ways a user can order the images, for example by ‘revenue’, ‘Revue/Month’, ’Return on Investment’ and Hourly Rate Estimate’.

Now lets see total earnings for these images.

Budget, ROI (Return On Investment), 2 year ROI and Estimated Hourly Rates are blank as these are figures which will show up depending on what figures you put in (I didn’t enter any). If I were to create a ‘fileset’ for these images, I could enter the ‘Budget’, ie. how much I spent and I’d also have the option of entering the amount of hours spent. From these figures, my Return On Investment and Estimated Hourly Rate would be calculated and added to the figures above. The revenue for images from the 4 sites show up automatically, without having to input any data. As you can see, so far from these images I have made $218.24. I can’t remember what my return flight from Singapore cost, but it would have been no more than $200. Therefore, these 23 images have already covered the cost of my flights and after a couple of more years, they are likely to cover the cost of my accommodation (I wasn’t staying in the Ritz).

Now lets break down the earnings, below are two charts which show my earnings from each agency and the type of sales.

We can see that most of my earnings have come from Shutterstock, with Dreamstime coming in a close second, also from these images I have earned almost an equal amount from ‘on demand’ downloads (credits) and downloads via subscriptions. My portfolios on istock and fotolia are a fraction of the size of my two main earners, so I can’t expect too much from them. Now for ‘Revenue Per Download’ and ‘Sell Through Rate’ (the percentage of photos that have sold at least once).

For these images, Dreamstime has paid me the most for each image downloaded, however DT’s ‘Sell Through Rate’ is at 77.78%, which isn’t bad, but that still leaves the other 22.22% of my Cambodia images on DT, waiting nervously before they face the firing squad.

Andrey Popov is the creator of Microstock Anlaytics and in my communications with him over the last couple of months, I’ve found him to be very professional, responsive and genuinely helpful. Microstock Analytics, he says, has benefited his income enormously as he is able to take the guess work out. By tracking images individually or by seeing various sets, he is able to get a clear picture of what works and what doesn’t and therefore shoot accordingly. At one point his earnings on these sites doubled every month, for three consecutive months and he puts this down to paying close attention to his analytics. Andrey is subscribed to the comments of this post, so if you want to ask him anything he will reply to you here, or you can contact him through the website contact form.

I’ve shown just a few functions and ways of looking at stats via Microstock Analytics. To really get an idea of what it can do and how it can be beneficial to you, you need to register. It’s free for ports with up to 500 images, so for example if you have 500 images across the 4 sites, the stats are tracking 2000 files. Paid packages for ports larger than 500 images start from $9.99.

Below, Andrey in his own words, explains further why he created Microstock Analytics.

“Once I began making decent sales on microstock sites, I wanted to know how well my photoshoots were performing. Initially I started tracking my sales using spreadsheets, but I found this to be time consuming. When I crossed 1000 sales per month I had to spend almost one whole day per month to calculate sales. What will happen when I reach 2K, 5K etc? This problem needed a solution. So I started working on software to help track my sales.

In the beginning it was supporting only Shutterstock. But soon I added the other agencies in the Big 4 and more features. Now tracking was easy and fun. Knowing how well my photoshoots are performing over time, I knew what to expect. Now I could estimate Return On Investment (ROI) on a photoshoot just after the first week of sales. It means I can make test photoshoots with several models and then know exactly the photos which will make more in return. Even if the difference between models fees were 2 times and more. This gave me a lot of confidence in future. Now I’m mostly working with semi-professional to professional models. At some point I decided that Microstock Analytics can be useful for other contributors as well. So I reworked the user interface completely, added more features, improved the speed and stability of software and built a website. Now Microstock Analytics is available to everyone. It is a continual process and I hope to keep improving it, adding more features and eventually more microstock sites.”

Related posts:

1. Pre-Launch Review of Stock Performer Analytics
2. Istock’s loss is Shutterstock’s gain

Back in November of last year, Shutterstock introduced a ‘Latest Downloads Map’ on the submitters homepage. Buyers anonymity is part and parcel of the microstock business, so although we don’t know who are buying our images we can now see on a world map, where our images are being bought from. Haha what fun, I always look at the map when I log in to see my images recent downloads and it never ceases to amaze me seeing my photos being downloaded from basically everywhere.

I couldn’t help noticing that I keep getting downloads from the ocean off the west coast of Africa. It’s been happening for months. I keep envisaging someone in a luxury yacht with internet connection, happily downloading images from Shutterstock. Yesterday, I had a download from the same location again. You can see it in the map above, the image of party goers clubbing in Bali, on the left of the map. So I decided to investigate and I typed ‘Africa map’ in Google and found a map of Africa and zoomed in. Alas, to my surprise I discovered some islands where I thought was just ocean, maybe they will name them after me . But it seems I am a little late as they have already been named The Republic of Cape Verde.

It is possible to subscribe to the rss feed of submitters galleries on Shutterstock, so unless there happens to be lots of stock buyers from this tiny nation who just keep stumbling accross my portfolio, I assume that someone there has added my portfolio‘s rss feed and is following me. Nice! I could do with a few more of them.

Anyone been following you lately?

Related posts:

1. Discover Microstock Analytics
2. Show Me the Money!

I was having a look at Shutterstock‘s new darkroom for contributors. It’s still in experimental phase, but looks pretty good to me already. In the Gallery View, we can view total earnings for individual images and these images appear in a list in order of total purchases, total earned or by the date uploaded. I clicked on total earned to see the order of my most lucrative images.

What are my earners?

I have a very small portfolio on Shutterstock, at the moment just 145 images. In a collection of 14.5 million images, it’s amazing that my images are found at all. However, my images are downloaded by buyers pretty much everyday and to date have been downloaded 1021 times. Looking at my top earning photos, I’m trying to see if there are any trends. 2 out of my top 10 earners are editorial images, 2 are landscapes (1 taken from a passenger plane), 1 is a cityscape (taken from a passenger plane), 4 are portraits and 1 is a still life shot, so a fair mix. Out of these 145 images, 52% of my earnings have come from just 10 images, which is just 6.9% of my portfolio and between them have been downloaded 434 times. If only there was a microstock clairvoyant plugin which could tell you what images you shouldn’t spend your time on. Could I have guessed that my top 10 shots would have done so well before I uploaded them? Possibly, but as much as I try to choose only winners to send to agencies, time and time again I guess wrong and it often surprises me that what I think may have great potential, often gets rejected by reviewers. But the reviewers don’t always get it right. More than 50% of my earnings are from just 10 images, but the reviewers had confidence in all 145 of them, many of which have just had a few downloads and 38 images haven’t had any downloads at all. So to a large extent it seems that they are guessing too.

Why are they winners?

Like many people who submit to microstock, I am not a full time photographer and take photos, edit and upload when I can. Until now, I haven’t spent too much time analysing my sales and just send the agencies images I like. But I want to start focusing more on what buyers like, so I will look more closely at what sells from now on. What is unusual about my own stats is that only 2 of my top ten most profitable photos on Shutterstock were shot with all seriousness, for me that mostly means going to an event with the intent of getting marketable images, but I also occasionally shoot models and still life. 8 out of my 10 most profitable shots were taken when I just had my camera with me (which is not always), without having any events to go to or ideas in my head, random pictures of people and places. So the images which I seem to be putting the least effort into are making me the most money. Maybe I should stop trying altogether.

I’m trying to find reasons to why these shots are doing so well. Walking around aimlessly and stopping if something or someone catches my eye is what I enjoy doing and what I have always done. I love to take portraits of ordinary people, but on the occasions I shoot models or still life, I find myself just wanting to get the shoot over with. The logic is, if you’re not enjoying it you’re not going to get the best results. Events I go to often just last a few hours, there is of course a certain pressure if you know that you have just a short time to get some decent shots. I’m not saying I don’t enjoy the events I go to or I don’t come out with anything good, but I still prefer to be walking around aimlessly and stopping if something or someone catches my eye. Also, often events that I go to have lots of photographers, with many of them being full time professionals, directly or indirectly this is my competition, which may be a much tougher competition than those who I’m competing with taking random photos of people and places.

I have experimented with all sorts of photography, but just don’t seem to enjoy it as much as what I already know and feel is second nature to me. And if I look at my top selling photographs on Shutterstock most of them represent what I feel I do best. Other images, although accepted by Shutterstock but of subjects I feel that aren’t my strongest, are competing with images by photographers who have more of a passion for these subjects, and it probably shows in their work. So although it may be good to diversify, the chances are that you are not going to be good at everything and it might be better to find what you’re good at and try to perfect it.

Shelf life

The nice thing about stock is that the work you do today can reward you for years and years. So it’s worth remembering when you shoot if the image you take has longevity. I have an image of passport stamps which sold really well for quite a while. However, sales of this image all but died out. The stamps date from 2006 to 2008, so the image looks outdated now. The image below though, of a Cambodian boy playing the flute, which I sent to agencies a couple of years ago, continues to sell consistently and I expect it to keep selling for years to come, well at least as long as there are boys in Cambodia selling flutes to tourists.

Get Big Headed

Ideally we would want a large revenue from each one of our images online. Although it may not be possible to have equal success with all our images, analysing our sales and images from time to time could help us to increase the size of our head and reduce the length of our tail, in other words being able to recognise and produce more of what sells and recognising also what doesn’t do so well. It seems I have a long way to go. Inevitably though, there will always be certain images which for whatever reasons just hit the right chord with buyers, whether we could predict it or not.

Your observations

These are personal observations and thoughts from my own portfolio, but I would be interested to know about winning images from your own portfolio. Why do they sell so well and how good are you at choosing winners?

Related posts:

1. Discover Microstock Analytics
2. Show Me the Money!

I was in the UK for most of October and due to various commitments I had no time for any microstock activities, apart from checking sales stats. However despite this, October turned out to be the best month by far, largely due to agencies that usually don’t have much activity.

After being accepted as a submitter on Shutterstock back in April, the site quickly became my highest earner. In October however, I had an astonishing 4 sales on Cutcaster, which earned more than the 44 sales I had on Shutterstock. Prior to this, I’ve only had 1 sale on Cutcaster in the 8 months I’ve been with them. My previous highest earnings was in July, which was largely as a result of an extended license sale on Shutterstock.

BigStockPhoto has always been a slow site. I remember not long after joining them last year, I asked for my account to be closed, as nearly 2 months had passed and I was yet to have a sale. I was informed by customer support that I could not close my account until the images have been online for 90 days. Before the 90 days had passed, I started to get a few sales and decided to keep my images there. October brought my highest income on BigStockPhoto, almost doubling the previous highest earnings and just falling short of Dreamstime‘s earnings, which are also on a 4 month high. I’m not sure if this sudden jump in income on BigStockPhoto is a direct result of Shutterstock’s acquisition, but I hope the rise in sales continues and I’m certainly glad I wasn’t allowed to close my account with them.

I’ve been with Can Stock Photo for almost a year, joining after it became an affiliate of Fotosearch. Initially sales with them were very slow, so I didn’t devote too much time to them. The last couple of months I’ve had regular sales with them, nothing to get too excited about, but the site definitely seems to be moving in the right direction and it would be wise to upload your photos there now, before they become a bigger player and start rejecting images which were once deemed worthy.

Microstock is still very much a sideline for me and when I say income, I really mean pocket money. However, when I get payouts, the dollars I receive go far further in Asia, than they would do in the States or Europe. And this month I was really given an example of the benefits of having images online, as I didn’t do any work, yet received my highest income.

Related posts:

1. Why bother?
2. Show Me the Money!

Summer is a wonderful season, good weather always helps to put a smile on peoples faces. However, summer doesn’t tend to do wonders for microstock sales. And this summer, in my opinion, there was extra negativity going around due to the dictate of fairly new circumstances. Shutterstock is predominantly a subscription based microstock site, for years it was the only one that I am aware of with this market strategy. Their bulk packages offer very good value for money for their large customer base. Within the last few years, other microstock sites decided to move into Shutterstock’s turf, in order to compete for this source of revenue. Although Shutterstock remains the market leader for subscription packages and still provides the highest revenue for many photographers. I read a lot of threads in forums over the summer about peoples sales becoming predominantly subscription based, as opposed to credit based purchases. The revenue received for photographers, per download is far lower from subscription downloads. However, as far as I gather from the views of others and from my own portfolios, the volume of sales haven’t increased enough to compensate for the decrease in credit based sales, even if the other agencies are managing to grab some of Shutterstock’s pie. I think what has happened is a lot of the agencies own regular customers have changed over to subscription, simply because they are such good deals. For example, on Dreamstime I could buy 18 maximum sized images with a $99.99 credit package purchase, or download 10 maximum sized images a day for a month with a $128.99 subscription package purchase. It really wouldn’t matter if I didn’t download all that was entitled to me, as I get so many more downloads for my dollars. So subscriptions are becoming more popular, but unless the other agencies are able to shift images at the volumes that Shutterstock does, I can’t see the trend being particularly favourable for contributors.

Some good news from Dreamstime is that images downloaded on subscription can now earn as much as $1.26, the bad news is an image won’t receive more than 35 cents (or 42 cents for an exclusive image) for a subscription sale, until it has surpassed 19 downloads. There are still some agencies who have yet to incorporate the subscription model into their sites, BigStockPhoto being one of them and those who contribute to Stockxpert are given the option to opt out of subscription sales. Although, how long will it be ’til BigStockPhoto introduces subscriptions and Stockxpert makes it mandate for all to opt in, is anyone’s guess. My guess is sooner rather than later.

Also in the summer Dreamstime, until now the bastion of fair commissions, at least from the sites which have good sales, gave final notice of their impending reduction of commission from a flat 50% rate for all non-exclusive images, to a staggered commission rate system, starting at 30%. Contributors are only able to receive 50% commission again for any given image, once the image has received 100 downloads. The commission for photographers who work exclusively with Dreamstime remains at 60%. Naturally there has been a lot of disappointment expressed by many of those who regularly submit to Dreamstime, and some gloating expressed by some of those who work exclusively with them. I don’t think any microstock agency would stay in business if it weren’t for their non-exclusive photographers. Yet the difference in pay between the two sets of contributors will now be substantial. With contributors being dispersed over the entire globe and the agencies being unified bodies, the ball bounces nicely in their court. It is their court, I’m well aware of that and contributors can complain all they like in forums about decisions that affect them, but ultimately they have as always only one decision to make, whether to upload or not. The extra money is going to be used for more advertising. :-/

As many have pointed out in forums, contributors including myself have already been accepting commissions from other sites which are as low as 20%, so it makes no sense to shout “foul play”, instead we can only say “it was nice while it lasted”. They’ve offered their contributors 50% to 60% during the last 5 years, and at the same time managed to become one of the leading microstock sites. However, despite this precedented move, in my eyes Dreamstime is still the best microstock agency out there. The site is well presented and very intuitive, and Dreamstime is always coming out with new features for both buyers and contributors. In terms of entertainment and yes I often log in for entertainment, not having time to produce and submit mass volumes of images and at times not even having the inclination, Dreamstime has a good set up. I often spend time checking out the forums or blogs written by contributors. Although, Shutterstock’s forums are by far the most amusing due to the liberty given to participants.

I am an image maker and I’m not hiding the fact that I have my own bias. In the interest of giving some balance to this post I would like to direct you to another blog, which highlights the complexities microstock agencies have to face. http://www.microstockdiaries.com/creating-stock-is-easier-than-selling-stock.html

Related posts:

1. Dreamstime raise contributors commission to 100%
2. Istock’s loss is Shutterstock’s gain

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I’ve counted 17 countries that I’ve been to in all, which on the brag scale isn’t a massive amount. However, I’ve flown in a lot of planes and virtually the only thing I enjoy about this form of travel is looking out of the window. God help anyone who is sitting in my seat when I board! It is amazing to see the world from such height, countries fading into the background, seas appearing in the foreground, flying amongst and through beautiful cloud formations, squinting your eyes because of the brightness of the sun. I never get bored of looking out of the window, oh unless I’m flying into sunny Manchester.

A while back I remember looking at a microstock site’s do’s and don’ts page. In the don’ts there was a comment on how they don’t want images taken from aeroplane windows. I was surprised by the comment. Surely there are some great opportunities to get unique images from the sky. Unfortunately, I now can’t remember on which site I saw this, so if anyone has seen the comment, please let me know. UPDATE: Oops, I know now. The answer is in comments.

I took the photos in this post just after taking off from the city of Doha in the Middle East. The weather was perfect and we flew low over the city for quite some time. I was only in transit at Doha and never left the airport. I remember thinking as I was taking the photos, that I have a wonderful view of a city I’ve never been to.

As I mentioned in the comments of  the post The relationship between your blog and your sales, shortly after posting I checked my Shutterstock account and found that $28 had been credited. Ok this figure won’t help me take early retirement, but it is a large amount for microstock photography. I received the sum because someone had bought an Extended License for the image at the top of this post. I had heard of people getting EL sales but it has until now eluded me. ELs are bought when a buyer has uses for an image that a standard license does not allow, for example if a buyer wants to use an image for merchandise produced in large quantities. The smallest EL license package that Shutterstock has is 2 two downloads, which costs $199. So although the $28 is nice, it would be nicer to receive a bit more.

Anyway, I’ve finally got my first Extended License sale. I don’t just want this to be a milestone reached, naturally I would like to get many more. Here’s hoping.

Related posts:

1. Show Me the Money!
2. Istock’s loss is Shutterstock’s gain

Possibly way too early for a post like this, but what the heck, I’m currently devoid of any other ideas. I noticed when I posted “April Showers“, that I had a surge of sales, ok an extra trickle of sales in the few days after the post. I currently have over 500 files online in various places, with 345 of these files on agencies which sell on a regular basis. This might sound like a lot to some, but is actually microscopic in microstock terms. Often trying to get photos online with various agencies, is a bit like trying to complete a rubik’s cube and I was never very good at that. However, I seem to be doing ok for sales with the few photos I have online.

I started this blog with just one objective, to have fun and so far I’m enjoying it. It is also a nice release for me to write about my experiences in the microstock industry, and to comment on the industry in general. With the exception of a few uploads in 2007, my uploading really began in April 2008, and I started this blog at the end of December of the same year. Since January 2009, my sales have started to improve. Is my blog helping to improve sales? Below is a graph outlying sales I receive from Dreamstime, BigStockPhoto, 123rf and Shutterstock. These are the 4 agencies that I get regular sales with. The graph compares sales for the 3 days before posting blogs with the 3 days after. I only had my application accepted with Shutterstock on April 17, so Shutterstock figures are included in the graph from April 30.

Mmm, “elementary my dear Watson”. Ok I’m open to the  suggestion that these results are not conclusive, as I don’t have enough photos online. Maybe I will do a follow up blog in the future.

Probably the most well known microstock blogist is a man called Lee Torrens. He started contributing towards microstock agencies in 2005 and set up his blog Microstock Diaries, in 2007. The blog has become so successful, that he has for several months had little time for shooting or adding more images to his portfolios. Despite this, his sales show no signs of decline, in fact he reached a record high in May.

Below are some blogs on microstock that I visit with varying degrees of regularity. Obviously none of them are a scratch on this one, but they’re getting there.

Ordered alphabetically:
www.microstockdiaries.com
- for people selling photos online
www.mystockphoto.org
- how to sell, buy, download royalty-free photos
www.shootingstock.blogspot.com
- hints, tips and progress reports on my journey to be a full time stock photographer

Anyway, nice to get this post out before the end of the month. Summer months are traditionally poor for microstock sales. Maybe I will get a late flurry, to help pick up my July figures from off the floor.

Photo: Andrea Presazzi – Dreamstime

Related posts:

1. How do you choose winning images?
2. Discover Microstock Analytics

Microstock photographers face a slowdown in sales during the Northern hemisphere’s summertime, or so I hear. I’m assuming the drop is due to a decrease in search and download time and an increase in beach and feet up time. For me, I seemed to have had a drop in the last quarter of last year, however I’ve not been doing this long enough to be able to report on any trends.

For those of you who have been, I’m curious to know about monthly trends. Which months are good for you, which months are not? With the knowledge that there could be less eyes in front of screens during summer, do you upload less and wait for September before unleashing your work to newly invigorated buyers? Do any of you see a drop in sales towards the end of the year, maybe due to dwindling yearly budgets? I’d be interested to hear of your observations on seasonal trends.

I’ve made three simple polls, the first two you can give more than one answer. Thanks for answering and I look forward to seeing the results.

http://www.answers.polldaddy.com/microstockposts

Related blog: http://microstockinsider.com/guides/microstock-submission-calendar

Related posts:

1. How do you choose winning images?
2. Pre-Launch Review of Stock Performer Analytics