microstock report for August 2010

This month was a little bit down in some places, but big in others...

Shutterstock rebounded from a slow July to once again take first place (which it's been every month since we started Stock illustrations).

In second was Istockphoto with $79, but we finally broke 100 images.  This is the site where you want to have more illustrations on because they sell very well, but they are also very critical and turn away quite a lot.  But once you get them up, it's worth it!

Dreamstime almost lost out to VectorStock this month.  I couldn't believe how few sales we had on Dreamstime.  But this month they did their contest with a subject matter that most of us illustrators didn't think we could be a part of...so I really didn't add any new images this month.

VectorStock has come on pretty strong (for being one of the bottom feeders for so long).  It's had a best month ever - and can be counted on to have at least one sale a day.  We also just recently got a raise on the site (from 25 cents a download to 30 cents)...so that definitely helped.

And the rest were pretty standard - Fotolia and Bigstockphoto both just inched into double digits and Crestock pulled in the rear with 75 cents.  Ridiculous.  Crestock also took almost 5 months to approve the last nine images I uploaded to the site (which is a big reason why I stopped uploading).

All in all - it was still another $300 haul in Microstock.  That's pretty low, but since I've been on hiatus I've been focusing on licensing for real and not this small time stock image licensing (and it's only small time because I'm not investing more time into it).  But it's nice to still be pulling in as much money considering we really haven't added anything to our portfolios, and the images are still getting downloaded.  And I added a couple of new stock sites that still haven't recorded sales, but I have images on them!  Veer and Stockfresh...so we'll see how they do in the coming months....