Microstock report for July 2013

This is our microstock report for July 2013:

Shutterstock is finally faltering.  We've gone months without uploading a new file and it's finally starting to take effect.  The last two months we've not crossed the $100 payout level, so it takes at least 2 months to squeeze any money out of it.

I guess it means we'll have to start uploading new files - I don't like seeing it so low.  But we have other projects taking priority and, at least for us, microstock was always just an experiment in how much pocket change we could muster.  Turns out quite a bit!

All together our uploads have achieved over $15,700.  Of course that's over the course of years...we started in January 2009 where we had only one sale (so we almost never count that as our first month) and made 25 cents.  So 4 and a half years later we've made 15.7k.  Not bad.  It averages out to about three and a half thousand dollars a year.  Of course most of that was in the first two years where we were uploading a couple of files a week...

Anyway - that's all for now.  Enjoy the chart.  Or don't.  If you're looking to do your own microstock illustrations or photographs, I'd suggest starting with Shutterstock and slowly working your way down the list in the order of money we've made.  Those top three are the biggest for a reason.  They actually sell files - but none as much as Shutterstock.

June Microstock report

It's been a little while since I posted a microstock report.

Shutterstock continues to blow everyone else out of the water.  Deposit Photo seems to have sales every few days - but nothing is as consistent as Shutterstock.  We're still getting close to getting a payout with Shutterstock every month (or so) and haven't uploaded a new illustration since last year!

So it's nice that we continue to make money (even if it's small) without paying much attention.  There was a time I would check Shutterstock every couple of hours to see how much we sold, but these days I pop on every once in a while as it's no longer a focal point of our Illustration business.

The only downside to Shutterstock these days is that they've done a real disservice to people with referrals.  It used to be that if you referred someone to Shutterstock, you got 3 cents for every download they sold...but now they've put a cap on that.  So you get to enjoy it for a couple of years, but then Shutterstock goes back to making money off of them and you get nothing.  It wasn't the biggest deal for us, as our referrals equated to about $15-$20 a month, but still - every bit adds up.  Only now, thanks to their new rule, it doesn't.

Microstock report for January 2013

I'm pretty sure I skipped a month, but here's a fully updated microstock breakdown:

Shutterstock let us down last month - every month, if you get more than $100 sold, Shutterstock pays it out.  Sadly, in December, we only sold $91...but it gets added on to the next month and we'll collect February 1st.

We still haven't added any new files - and a lot of the sites are selling less - but they're still selling, and that's why I figured we might as well put out a report.

instead we're working on actual licensing.  We've drawn a series of characters we call Happy Pantry and they even have their own facebook page. 

Microstock report for August 2012

This is our microstock report for August 2012:

It was a much better month!  In July we saw a sag in all of the sites - none more disappointing than Istockphoto which was at an all time low of $5.38 - but this month many of the sites rallied back with high(er) numbers.

Shutterstock, as always, led the way with.  It helped to have 2 EL sales (that's a $32 download).  And it continues to sell the most on a daily basis.

One big surprise was Istockphoto - we used to have sales of almost $100 a month on this site - and it waned slowly lower and lower, until last month we only had $5 in sales.  Well this month it finally beat Dreamstime (which has been a consistent second place).

Overall it was a nice month - several sites reached their payout amounts and overall we reached $302!  Here's to hoping September continues to treat us kindly.

Microstock report for July 2012

It was a very slow month for microstocks in July.

We barely made our payout amount on Shutterstock with $106.

Across the boards we had small dips at each site.  The only bright spot is that we had a couple of sales on Veer that finally made me add it as a category (and take Canstock off, since it's barely made $100 in 3 years and only made fifty cents this year so far).  And I signed up for a few new sites - the best one, so far, is Depositphoto - which had just about $5 in sales...not bad for a brand new site...well, in such a slow month.

August is already shaping up to be a better month.  On day one we had an EL and an OD (that's $28 and $2.70) on Shutterstock (which is already closing in on $50 for the month of August...or almost half of what we made in all of July).  So we'll see if it can continue!

Microstock Report for June 2012

Here's the microstock report for June, 2012:

It was a best month ever for 123rf!  After about two years on this site (which is the same as most of the other sites) we're still getting downloads...which amounted to $36.64 - and it snuck past BigStockPhoto on the lifetime earnings (the chart above doesn't reflect this because I already saved the jpg before I switched them around.

Shutterstock still remains the only site to consistently earn above $100 every month.  We've also been on this site for over two years and there's only been one month that we didn't meet the payout amount (which is a hundred).  It's crazy to have the same images on every site (mostly) and somehow Shutterstock outpaces everyone else - even if they combined their totals! 

I didn't have time to add any new stock images this month, but it still kept pace with the previous month...we'll see if July brings us any more time to create new illustrations...

microstock report for May 2012

Here's another exciting installment of our microstock report for May!

Shutterstock is terrific.  If it wasn't for them, I don't know if I'd be paying as much attention to the whole microstock business.  This May I ended up posting a lot more files - but apparently I'm terribly out of touch with what sells these days...so I'm going to have to keep stretching that creative muscle and see what I can do for the month of June.

Istockphoto made quite a lot of  money for quite some time...but they changed their licensing payment plan to favor exclusive contributors...and the downloads have slowed to a crawl.  One good thing about the company is that they approve the files in record time.  When I started three years ago it took almost a week to get approved, and now it's within hours.  Too bad none of the files get downloaded.

The rest of the sites had small boosts this month.  I'd like to think that'll continue...but the summer months are very slow...so we'll see how it goes.

Microstock report for April 2012

This is our microstock report for April of 2012.  It was a bit of a downturn in all the stock sites, so towards the end I did one quick illustration...and I'll try to come up with some more this month to see if we can't turn those numbers around a bit.

Shutterstock still leads all the stock sites in how many sales we get each month - which translates into the highest earnings.

Istockphoto is really taking a turn for the terrible - as I can't remember the last time we made that little since we started.

 Dreamstime is slowly creeping up on Istock and could end up being our #2 lifetime earner soon enough.  It's still not too high, but it consistently makes between $20 and $40 a month.  And because of the image contest they do every month, I always want to create something for it, so we've ended up with a lot of exclusive files that sell at a higher price point on this site.

 This was the one new file I did for the stock sites...I'll try to do more spot illustration type drawings and we'll see if they sell or not.  It's feeling a little too much like clip art...

Microstock Report for March 2012

Here's our microstock report for March of 2012:

We were busy working on other projects once again, so we didn't add any new files this last month.

Shutterstock is still the best at consistently selling our illustrations.  A couple of months ago I decided to start posting the lifetime earnings of each of the sites.  I feel like it's one thing to tell people you can make money creating stock images, and another thing to actually state the numbers.  I've uploaded my illustrations to have this be a passive income (meaning that I don't really actively create and upload new images on a consistent basis), so it's fantastic to make between 200 and 300 dollars a month on something I'm barely paying attention to. 

On the other hand, some of the sites are suffering because of it.  Istockphoto used to reach almost $100 (if not more) each month.  That's reflected in the lifetime total earnings, but also in the fact that it now makes less than Dreamstime each month.

Some of these sites continue to make money...others, such as Crestock, have yet to get off the ground and probably never will.  In March I signed up for a new site called DrawShop.  I've heard the sales aren't the best, but they have the possibility to do custom jobs, so I wanted to see how that would play out.  I've only uploaded 65 files...

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.

November Microstock Report

This is November's Microstock Report:

Shutterstock led the pack once again.  Along with Istockphoto, they're one of the biggest agencies that deal with licensing photographs and vector illustrations.  It's strange that all this time Shutterstock has maintained an average over $100, whereas www.istockphoto.com (which had a couple of months with the century mark about a year ago) has faded, and was overtaken by Dreamstime last month.

Vectorstock is a site that a few vector artists don't care for - the reason why is that the payouts are very low per image.  I'll have a ton of sales each month (which i like because I visit each site at least once a day, and it's a lot more fun when the dollar amounts change, even if it's just a little), but it only amounts to just over $20.  I like to stick with them though because sales are sales - and Vectorstock is one of the more consistent selling sites I'm affiliated with.

There are a bunch of other sites that I signed up with that aren't really doing much of anything.  Crestock is one of the original sites I joined and it's made zero monies in four of the last five months.  Some other dud stock sites (for me) are Stockfresh (which just started, so I'm waiting to see if that changes) and Veer (another new site, but another one that doesn't sell much).

With that said - I think it's better to have a portfolio of illustrations across a variety of microstock agencies.  It means that more businesses and people in need of images have a better chance of finding your stuff and purchasing the license.  If you're thinking of selling your own vector artwork (or photographs) - I'd say start with Shutterstock - it's one of the easier sites to get into (you have to have 10 images approved, but their approval process is lax compared to an agency like Istockphoto).  But once you get going, I'd suggest at least signing up with the big three (Shutterstock, Istockphoto, and Dreamstime) and then think about the rest.

Microstock report for October 2011

This is our microstock report for October 2011.  We uploaded a couple of new images, but they were for Halloween and I wasn't able to finish them until the end of the month...so there wasn't enough time for them to get accepted and be available for people to download...

The thing is, if you're going to make pictures for a particular day, you should probably have them up and ready to go at least a month before.  And it might be better if you have it 2 months before that holiday.  My illustrations weren't available until the week before Halloween, so we only got a couple of downloads and now everyone is focused on thanksgiving (and the big one) or Christmas.

Here's the October breakdown:

Shutterstock is the only site that seems to keep delivering month after month.  Since we started doing microstock in February of 2009, we have only had one month where we didn't make the $100 minimum to get paid (If you make less than a hundred dollars, it just rolls over to the next month and so on until you do reach a hundred).

I might try to put some Christmas images up in the next couple of weeks, so we'll see if that helps spark more interest in the rest of the portfolio across the different microstock sites....

123rf and Vectorstock are both doing fairly well too.  Those are two smaller sites that seem to stay very consistent each month.  We had our best month ever on 123rf this month...and Vectorstock seems to hit around $15 each month.  Both totals are kind of on the small side, but it's nice to check every couple of days because they always have sales.

Microstock report for September 2011

Another step backwards in the licensing world.  It's only microstock licensing, so no big worries.  We haven't put any new files into the sites this month (and really only two illustrations since spring)...so it's to be expected that there won't be big returns.  With that said we still are averaging above $200 a month without having to do any more work.

Shutterstock is the best microstock site out there.  From the very beginning (when we started in February of 2009) we uploaded 10 images and they immediately started making money...and it has stayed consistent ever since.  We've just crossed the $5,000 since our start with this site.

Istockphoto changed their rates for people who aren't exclusive with them and it's really hurt our numbers.  Istockphoto started to net over $100 a month for a time, but it now fails to bring in anything worth being proud of.

Dreamstime is a site that I was starting to think would pick way up.  They have a contest every month with a theme that you can upload to...and so any new illustrations usually went into that.  Not to win, but because each illustration would be worth more if downloaded.  Now the majority of our downloads on this site are from our contest illustrations, but they're still not selling too frequently and Dreamstime still finishes behind Istock...

Everything else stays in the $10-$25 range for the other sites...they're small, but you can usually count on them to bring in some loose change.

I signed up with two new stock sites a few months ago - Veer and Stockfresh.  Neither one is selling terribly well...we've had a total of two sales on Stockfresh and are averaging one download per month from Veer...so I lump them into the same category with Thinkstock (another site that doesn't produce much) and together they combined for $13.80 in sales.

So that wraps it up!  Go sign up with Shutterstock, it's worth the time!

microstock report for August 2011

 Shutterstock made a lot of cashola this last month.  It was a nice upswing from the last couple of horrible summer months.  They say that microstock sells poorly in the summer, so it's nice to pull out of that as we registered lows in Dreamstime and Istockphoto last month.

in August Shutterstock sold 2 ELs for us (that's a $28 license...as compared to the usual subscription downloads of 35 cents each or the ODs of $2.70).  With those two ELs Shutterstock powered our monthly earning back over $300.

Dreamstime and Istockphoto did the normal $40s in sales.  And everything else just puttered along as they've done since we joined their sites.

So far it's still a lot of fun to check the totals and see what's sold on a day to day basis.  It's nice that old images that were done a couple of years ago are still selling well...and that even though we're uploading few, if any, images each month we're still making money!  It could be more, but we haven't been investing the time.  You have to put in the work if you want to see results...

Microstock Report for July 2011

This month took another hit...a lot of our regular companies, like Dreamstime and Istockphoto, just did not sell.  Shutterstock remained consistent.

Also - two smaller companies that we upload illustrations to (Vectorstock and 123RF) have both done nicely the last few months - with 123RF having achieved our best month in sales for the site.

We uploaded several files to each of the sites, so it was nice to see a little spike in activity after that, but we're still missing that big illustration that'll jump start the selling back to where it was just over a year ago...

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!

Microstock report for May 2011

So this was another month where we didn't pay any attention to our microstock sites - but still made a few dollars:

Shutterstock accounted for 50% of the total stock sales revenue.  That one seems to be pretty steady while all of the other sites are slowing down...still selling, but slowing down.

I'd like to spend some time creating new illustrations, so hopefully I'll be able to get to that this week (while I have some vacation time)....but I have some other projects to work on (we always seem to have something), so we'll see if anything gets posted.

Microstock Report for April 2011

I can't believe it's already may!  This marks the second month into our 3rd year of selling microstock.  I should check to see how much we've made collectively up until this point...but in any case - here's the information about April:

Everything took a downward tumble this last month - which is weird because April has usually been one of our better months...One part might be the fact that we haven't been adding new files/illustrations to our microstock portfolios...so we'll see if we can't change that in the coming months...

Shutterstock stayed on top...

123RF made a push into the top 4...which marks the first time it's been that high on the chart.  The listing of 'all other stock' includes freshstock, veer, and whatever stockxpert turned into.

Still, as I always say - it's nice that we haven't done any, or that much, work and we're still pulling in about 300 dollars a month!

This is the one file I added this month:

Microstock Report for January 2011

This is the first Microstock report for the new year...and it's doing quite well as apposed to last month:

Shutterstock continues to account for 41% of our entire earnings.  And we actually had several of our illustrations taken out.  I while ago I was doing a series of celebrity illustrations (one of George Clooney, Natalie Portman, Diablo Cody, and Zach Braff)...and since that went nowhere, I put them on the microstock sites.  They should have been only available for editorial licenses...but after almost two years online they were all pulled from the site...citing possible copyright infringement.  And it's not like they illustrations were, but Shutterstock likes to be careful...and it doesn't matter that much because they weren't big sellers anyway.  But that's what accounts for the portfolio going from 702 to 700.

Istockphoto sold a lot less this last month...it's been very spotty as of late...I feel that with baseball season coming back it should start doing much better.  I have a series of baseball caps that sell very well during the spring months.

Dreamstime made a strong showing of it this month...and I'm hoping for even more in the coming months as I'm going to try my hardest to make time for their new contests as they come up.  I have one illustration already approved for this month's contest (the fireman, which I posted last week on this blog) and another one that's still a rough drawing.

The rest of the sites were alright.  Vectorstock sells decently considering it's a smaller site with less customers.  And, as I said before, it's nice to continue to make over $200 each month without having to spend much, if any, time creating new illustrations for these sites...I mean, more money could be had if I spent more time at it, but making money and spending no time sounds pretty good too...

Microstock report for December 2010

This is our microstock report for December, 2010.

Shutterstock led the way again.  It was the first time in a while where it came down to the last couple of days whether or not we would cross $100 for the month.  But then two ODs were sold on the 29th (ODs are worth $2.70 each)...and all was right.

It's been the same story as the last few months - we haven't had time to upload many, if any, images for the stock sites - and so our numbers are slowly going down.  We uploaded a couple more images this month, but they were really a combination of older vector illustrations.

Veer has our smallest portfolio (only 2 downloads this month, but each was worth $7.00) - but only because 20 images were turned down this summer due to open shapes and I haven't wanted to spend the time uploading them again.  Cory Thoman, who got me into selling stock illustrations, has recently signed up with a couple of newer agencies, so I'm probably going to sign up with them as well...but only if I can find the time.

If you see the rest of my blog, I've been working on my proprietary projects, so making generic illustrations hasn't been a priority...

But maybe in the new year - I've missed watching an illustration take off and sell like booze and hotpants.