Microstock report for June 2011

This last month I was able to work on a couple of new illustrations.  They were really quick and small, but it was nice to upload something after a few months with no new images.  Some of them sold on Shutterstock, but so far they really haven't taken (at least not yet):

 It was a series of variations on these two kids (smiling, arms open, handing each other gifts).  I thought they were cute.  When I have time, I'll probably try and draw some more with these characters.

Anyway - on to the report!

Shutterstock continues to pull in more than a hundred dollars a month.  In June we had our first EL of the year - that's an extended license and it sold for $28.  So while we had some microstock sites netting less, Shutterstock stays pretty consistent.  It helps also to have a referral who is currently more successful than our own site because we get 3 cents for every download he gets (we made $15.63 from that alone, which, if you think about it, means he had over 500 sales/downloads for the month while we had 286).

The EL was the entire sign language alphabet

A huge upset came in the form of Dreamstime which finally made more money than Istockphoto.  Sadly it means that Istock is losing steam these last few months and Dreamstime is staying fairly consistent.  Dreamstime also had two really big sales (one for $9 and another for 5.50) at the end which helped push it over $40 for the month.

All the other sites continued to make their pennies, but every bit counts!  And they're really just sitting around slowly collecting money, so I like to keep them around.  I have a couple of new files in the works, so we'll see if next month works out any better!

And if you want to start selling your own artwork on these sites - sign up through one of my links!  You have to upload a couple of files which they'll decide whether or not you're good enough, and then you can just start uploading to your heart's content!  It might sound daunting, but it's rather easy.  And vector files sell better than regular files, so warm up those illustrator skills!