Microstock report for December 2011

Decembers are usually a really bad month for stock licensing.  The holidays and vacations keep people from downloading.  This December brought a couple of days on Shutterstock where we didn't get any downloads, and while it was down from last month, it was still a fairly good month.

Shutterstock once again carried over 50 percent of the sales this month.  Bigstockphoto rallied after last month's disappointing fifty cents showing by coming in 3rd overall for December.  When we first started with Bigstockphoto we consistently had months like that (where regular $3 dowloads happened each week), but recently it's been a struggle to sell anything on that site.  Hopefully this is a sign of Bigstockphoto picking back up.

I decreased the sizes of a couple of portfolios because I had an illustration on several sites that I've decided to take in a different direction:

I drew this a few years ago with the idea to turn it into a vinyl toy.  I put that idea on hold for a while because I started pursuing other avenues - and recently I've teamed up with a couple of friends from work to create apps and vinyl toys.  This one eyed blob monster will be our first vinyl toy.

And what's interesting is just as I took this image off the stock illustration sites, I was suddenly contacted by someone that wanted to do an Ipad game with this character.  So I was able to negotiate a license with the person directly.  So this year could see this character with it's own toy AND game app!

In October, I found out that you could drag any picture into Google.com (in the image area) and it will do a search based on that image.  I found several of my stock illustrations being given away for free or being used by blogs illegally (or at least without any credit)...This year I'm going to start including a copyright on each image.  It's kind of lame, but it's a good way to ensure that people won't use these images without permission.