Microstock earnings for June, 2009

This month was the second in a row where we had no time to upload new images. We had a total of 9 images uploaded to Shutterstock (three were just variations on another design) but none of them really did anything. Tracey did this image:



Which I was quite impressed with - it was done entirely in Adobe Illustrator - and it looks so photo realistic to me - and while we've had some bites on it (downloads), it hasn't taken off like I expected it to. Hopefully some chocolate strawberry eaters out there will start taking notice and download it (and download it a lot)...

Shutterstock was still our highest earner with 149.74. It's still the best site as far as consistant downloads and it's the easiest to get accepted to (as well as having the most lenient of file acceptance rate of any of the microstock companies)

What surprised me was Dreamstime - they do a contest every month and the topic for June was cooking - so I whipped up a little drawing of a boy making pancakes (and Tracey colored it) - it didn't win the contest, but yesterday it was downloaded for 25 dollars! It's the single highest amount we've received for a file, and it pushed Dreamstime into second place with just over $70 for the month. http://www.dreamstime.com/res1220499-stock-images

the third place finisher was Istockphoto - like Dreamstime, they were the only two microstock agencies to end with a higher total than last month. Our uploads are very slow on these sites (only 3 for dreamstime and 5 for istockphoto), but it hasn't affected our download rates (which have also gone up on these two sites)...

The rest were kind of disappointing...Stockxpert had consistant downloads all month long - but it was only 1 or two per day - which ended up at a low 9 dollars...and the rest of the sites are barely worth talking about...

Whoops - I did forget (for the second month) to list Fotolia on this list. They made a comeback in terms of monies - just under $20 for June. But the downloads are so few and far between...it was rather disappointing to ever check the totals. The only good thing is that the choco strawberry was downloaded 3 times (for a total of $3.90)...hopefully next month it'll pick up - but i doubt it. What sucks is that this site was only accepting vector art as svg files (a terrible vector format) and this last month they finally caught up with all the other agencies and started accepting things as eps or ai files (the accepted Adobe Illustrator versions of vector art), but since I had already uploaded the majority of our stuff as svg files, I expect we're missing out on a lot of sales because they're all the old format.

Anyway - that's the month of June for microstock...once again it was nice to clear $300 (with the addition of fotolia) without having to put in any work. That's why I got into microstock in the first place...was that way my illustrations could sit around collecting me small amounts of money instead of dust...so far, so good!