Microstock earning for April

When I originally started this report, I was following the template set by a couple of other microstock earners - and I reported my percentage, but not my actual numbers...but throughout this past month i found a bunch of other people who were very candid with how much they made, and I decided that it would be more fun to do it that way.

April was a good month on several sites, none better than Shutterstock. In April we saw our overall total rise above $500 lifetime total which is the first milestone for a raise. Our individual downloads rose from 25 cents each to 33 cents. And an on demand download went from $1.88 to 2.48. We've been on the site since February - so it took us about 2 and a half months to achieve that goal. In all we made $284.81 on Shutterstock.

What was suprising was that our second highest microstock site was Stockxpert. They came on with a bang with this one -

selling three times on April 1st for a total of $14 dollars. Overall on stockxpert we made $36.80 - it wasn't a giant total, but it was consistant...there were downloads throughout the month, not every day, but most days...

In third place was Dreamstime. I expected better things out of them after March - but April started with a whimper...and continued...and it was hard to check our numbers on this site as they stayed the same for too many days in a row. In all we reached $28.10 - but it was on the back of a three files that sold for 5 dollars at a time. One bright spot is that one of our files was downloaded a total of 5 times since it's been up at Dreamstime (which means it's more expensive for anyone else wanting to download it...I'm not sure if that hurts it's chances of getting downloaded again).

The rest of the sites were also very disapointing - with the exception of vectorstock. But I had such low expectations for that one that reaching 8 dollars was quite a surprise.

Istockphoto was the hardest nut to crack. It took me over two months to finally get approved (even trying my most popular files on shutterstock got me denied). And once I did get in, three quarters of my files were rejected for one reason or other.

This file

Which has been downloaded over 200 times on shutterstock was turned down...as were many others...We have over 400 images in our shutterstock portfolio now...and only 23 in Istockphoto. I had heard so many good things about istockphoto...and so far they've just been the most difficult and (because of the hype) the most disappointing. I expect as we get further into microstock and figuring out what's appropriate to upload it'll get better. But for now I'm just disallusioned with them.

Anyway - overall it was a good month. I uploaded less images in April than I did in March because of real freelance and work...and while that resulted in less downloads overall for Shutterstock, we netted more money (because of the raise, and more ODs this month).

I expect to make a lot less the next few months as both Tracey and I will be busy with work and freelance and my gallery show at Nickelodeon (coming in July) - but what's nice about microstock is that the files that are currently up will continue to sell (definitely less, than if we were consistantly uploading new stuff, but still, it's nice to make money without actually having to do any more with it).