It was a bit of an off month for microstock. There were a couple of reasons though - most people agree that the summer months are very slim (just like the bit of time right after Christmas)...so it's to be expected to have a drop off from the spring numbers. We made almost $400 last month (which was still a little bit down from the month before) and for July we only pulled in $323.
But I'm not terribly disappointed because the second reason is that we really didn't invest any time into uploading new images. And you HAVE to upload new images consistently if you want to see your numbers go up.
Our number one site since we started this whole stock image venture is Shutterstock. What's nice is that we've passed another 'raise' on this site - after you make a total of $500 lifetime on Shutterstock, you go from making 25 cents an image to 33 cents - and in July we crossed $3000 which means we now make 36 cents an image. It doesn't sound like a lot - but it adds up since we average somewhere between 350-500 image downloads per month.
Second on the list, once again - is the powerhouse of Istockphoto. It's a site that should be a bigger seller, but we just don't have enough images on it. And I submitted several new images (the same ones I submitted to the other sites) and they were declined. It's the struggle one goes through to work with Istockphoto...but its definitely worth it.
Dreamstime was our 3rd place finisher (yet again). The top three seem to always fall in line. What's nice is that Dreamstime finally had some life this month and recorded a respectable number for the first time in a few months. $40 still isn't where I want it to be, but it's getting there. As the portfolio grows, so will the numbers.
Fotolia surprised me with a 4th place finish - it's the second month in a row that recorded decent numbers (decent for Fotolia). I used to be able to count on this site, but have been very disappointed in the last year or so. And since this is where our second highest portfolio is (with almost 300 images), we should definitely be getting more downloads.
The rest of the field is pretty small potatoes. Vectorstock looks like it'll regularly come in with double digits in earnings...but the rest is just too hit and miss. I signed up for a new site called StockFresh - it's by the same people that created Stockxpert (which they then sold, and it was subsequently shut down)....so we'll see if anything happens there. Oh - and I also signed up for Veer - they offered some duckets to just upload images, so I made about $11 putting about 40 images up on that site - and while there have been a couple hundred views, there has yet to be a sale...but the site just relaunched, so, while I don't know what to expect...it should sell something soon.
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