Annual review of Microstock activities in 2011

I’ve just published my December stock photo earnings results, and thought it would be helpful to review the year – how I did, what changed, lessons learned and thoughts for 2012.

First, a graph of earnings per site through 2011:

The December results showed the growth in earnings, but in a nutshell, I went from total earnings in Dec 2010 of $429 to $1188 in Dec 2011. Month to month growth over the year of 176%! What did I do to achieve that growth? The first change was in the number of sites that I upload to. In December 2010, I uploaded to 18 sites (although some of them were relatively new to me and I didn’t have my full portfolio on-line.) I now have my images on 26 sites, and have most of my images on all of those sites. I’m still behind on iStock, because of the 20 images a week limit, but the majority of my sites have over 1500 images for sale. I found Lightburner to be a great help in streamlining the uploads, although that site is a bit inconsistent at times, and I still find myself doing FTPs to sites that have somehow failed to get the new images. As this graph makes clear, Shutterstock is far and away my best earner, although iStock, with approximately half the number of images, is also strong. The Photo+ program on iStock has definitely helped me in 2011. As I’ve mentioned before, iSignStock is a good site (for me at least) with earnings of $300 in the year. I only started with them in March and probably didn’t have all my images online before the summer.
The next thing I focused on during 2011 was the number of images I have for sale.I’ve started trying to add at least 100 images a month to the stock sites – either because I have traveled somewhere and found some interesting landscape or travel images, or I have taken still life, food or macro shots. I have not expanded into the use of professional models yet, although I do OK with self portraits in various guises! The graph shows the growth in three typical sites – CanStock, which accepts most images, Shutterstock, which is reasonably strict, and iStock with its strict policies and restricted uploads. Shutterstock went from around 1300 to 2016, iStock from 700 to 1206 during the year. I focused even harder in December on this, adding 150 images to the Shutterstock portfolio alone.
The third strand in growth was probably quality. We all like to take good quality images, and I am probably learning, all the time, what makes a good stock photo. I started tracking earnings per image per month late in the year to try to understand if I was gaining earnings simply because I was adding new files, or was I making more, or less, per image. Earnings per photo per month was discussed last month, but here are the final 2011 numbers:


As you can see, the earnings on each image have grown during the year. I am sure that is partly to do with images becoming more visible in the search engines, but the stock agencies are cutting back on commissions, not growing them, and so a growth in the earnings per image is a pretty positive sign for me personally.

Thoughts for 2012? I haven’t mentioned my “Getting Started in Stock Photography” eBook for some time, but this has continued to sell during the year. I don’t count those earnings in my monthly summaries (I don’t count Zazzle either although I get calendar sales reasonably regularly on that site as well as postcards and note cards of Washington DC). Over the past 9 months or so, I’ve sold about 80 copies of my eBook, and people I have been in touch with (it is nice to hear from readers, by the way!) have been unanimously happy with their purchase. I’m thinking of writing a new book in 2012, but we will have to wait and see. I beat the $10K mark in overall earnings in 2011, so my target for 2012 needs to be a stretch – I would really like to get to $20K, but that would be probably outside my capabilities, and so I will set $18K as my target for earnings in 2012!

Happy New Year and Good Shooting!