Microstock report for September 2009

Once again the highest earner in September was Shutterstock. It was down a little from the month previous, but I guess the new images didn't generate as much interest as we would have liked...I have a bunch of Halloween illustrations that I'm hoping generate interest, but not so far. But even without a popular image, the site still continues to impress with constant and steady downloads.

Istockphoto - is still impressing me. It's our BME (an abbv they always use meaning Best Month Ever) on this site...and we're also up to 55 images (they are very selective with what they approve as apposed to Shutterstock which will accept most anything...which is why the Shutterstock is almost at 500 and the istockphoto portfolio is only 55.) What's nice about Istockphoto is that while you'll get less downloads per month, each one is worth more...I expect Istockphoto to just continue to grow and I'm excited to see the numbers as the days go by...

Third up is (always) Dreamstime. It was such a disappointing month in August - so it's nice to see it rebound a bit with $34.52. The biggest problem is that Dreamstime was freezing my internet explorer whenever I tried to upload an image - I finally switched to Firefox and was able to get it to work.

Fourth was a surging
Bigstockphoto . We had tons of sales early (3 dollars here, 50 cents there) and then suddenly it dried up...still ended with $18.50 for the month, but the way it started made it look much more exciting than where it ended.

A big surprise this month was 123RF.com. I had written this site off as well as Crestock because we weren't getting any downloads off of them at all. But suddenly this site shoots into 5th place with $13.51! I was quite surprised, but it got me to upload a lot more illustrations to their site. It would be nice if it continued...and if it continued to go up...

Fotolia has been quite a disappointment after a stellar start back in March. We did better this last month ($12.45) than the one previous ($4.55 in August)...but downloads are way down and few and far between. We're still dedicated to them because we're at 99 downloads currently (and when we reach 100, that's when a small pay increase kicks in).

Anyway - this month overall was better than the previous one. We made a total of $318.48 between all the stock sites we are on (9 total)...and I just uploaded some realistic baseball caps to each one...so hopefully that one takes off and I can report BMEs in every one...see ya next month!