Microstock report for February 2010

 

 This month rebounded from a bit of a slow month.  I guess in any industry you have to be prepared for a bit of a letdown in the month of January.  But in February we uploaded a lot of images and enjoyed the results.

Shutterstock, once again, led the pack.  It's the easiest site to upload images to, and is the only one where we've had at least one download every day.  Istockphoto is second on the list, and while we reached our first milestone (250 downloads) it doesn't do anything to increase our sales or sale percentage.  It's just nice to see that the images are selling on that site.  Istockphoto always comes in second based on a regular amount of downloads (just not as regular as Shutterstock) and the fact that each download earns us about $2.50.

Dreamstime came in third - and it's really settled into that spot.  I had higher hopes for it this last summer when it frequently competed with Istockphoto for second...but at least it's averaging around $40 a month.  In February I tried hard to upload a bunch of illustrations for their monthly contest (still waiting for the results, as the contest ended on the 22nd).  So far three out of the 5 contest images have sold once (and I expect more as the months go on).  The contest is for members of Dreamstime that have at least 50 images online - and you can win up to $300 for first place.  But even better than that (because most of us won't win) is that each image accepted into the contest becomes a top level image.  That means when it sells, it sell for a lot more (for example - a regular file will make 35 cents for a subscription download, but a contest file will make $1.26).

Everything else was disappointing...at least compared to Shutterstock.  Some of the sites - like Vectorstock - are BME (best month ever) but it's still only $9.25.  It's slow, but they'll continue to get better as the portfolio sizes get bigger.

What's horrible this month is the closure of Stockxpert.  They were enveloped into the Istockphoto family and shut down completely.  So while that site only accounted for 15 dollars or so a month, it was still one of the better ones.  And now it's gone.

And finally - the worst site of the month has been Crestock.  I've had files since November uploaded that still haven't been approved.  And when sales do happen, they're the smallest of all the sites at 25 cents a pop.