Overall sales were $112 at an average of 10 cents per image (RPI) this month having now sold 30% of my images to date (STR) with an average of 192 images in my portfolio at 6 sites.
BMEs at bigstockphoto and 123rf. 3rd best month at iStock. I got a licensed sale for $13.50 of the following image from bigstockphoto, my first there:
I’m really glad the summer slump is over! I haven’t had a chance to do almost any new shooting, processing or uploading, but expect to have a chance to do some this month.
Congrats to Constance on her recent acceptance by Shutterstock. Check out her great portfolio there!
I’ve changed the theme for this blog for the first time since it’s inception way back in 2005 Let me know what you think! I’m not ambitious enough to make my own from scratch and so I settled on one of the nicer pre-made themes. I’ve also updated my homepage with new images (http://jrtb.com) in addition to changing the link for the gallery to our smugmug gallery (http://jrtb.smugmug.com). Let me know if you forgot the password!
I’ve been using Chrome (Google’s new browser based on Safari) since it’s release yesterday at 3:02pm I love it! The only site I haven’t been able to use with it is Yahoo (I can’t login there..). What is everyone’s experience with Chrome? I wish they had a Mac version already!
Picassa 3 was released today! Google has been busy! For the most part, I think I like all the new features. Red eye correction looks great, and the names feature in web-albums looks really awesome! I still don’t think you can allow family access to private albums with a common password though - show stopper! I’ll probably end up using both Picassa web albums and Smugmug.
A slight improvement on last month with $102 in sales on a 4% portfolio increase (7 new images).
Shutterstock surpassed Istock for me this month for the first time ever with the help of a $28 Extended License and a $1.88 On Demand sale! Sales at the other agencies (14% of the monthly total) improved across the board.
I’m slightly improving my RPI (.03) and STR (2%). The EL sale at Shutterstock this month helped!
I spent a bunch of time last month doing other things and I expect that to continue. If I can get a handful of new images processed and uploaded this month, that’ll be a plus
Here is an updated alexa report on the top 5 stock sites (for me):
Looks like the bottom continues to drop out for Istock and that they will soon be on par with the other big 2 (SS, DM). I had a pretty good month last month at Istock, but am seeing very flat sales so far this month. Perhaps they have lowered their advertising budget to maximize their bottom line for a potential re-sale?
July was a great month for me! I gather that July is usually a down month for most folks, so to get such a sharp rebound from last month this month is fantastic!
I made $101 and had BMEs at shutterstock (for downloads), dreamstime, 123rf and bigstock. Shutterstock overtook Istock this month in the Return Per Image statistic, probably due to all the uploads this month.
This was in part due to my continued effort to really focus on increasing my portfolio size. I was able to increase my portfolio by 20% this month with an average of 29 new images accepted at each agency. That’s on top of last month’s 20% growth with 25 new images accepted on average!
I don’t think I’m going to be able to sustain that as I only have about 25 new images waiting to be processed. At my average acceptance rate (58%), that would be about 15 new images and 8% growth next month.
I dropped canstockphoto from my results reports due to a lack of activity there (only 1 download this month). I’m going to continue to submit there in addition to crestock, yaymicro and fotominds to see if activity at any of those sites picks up.
In related news, congrats to my wife for getting accepted to istock and getting downloads last month! Check out her portfolio!
A great post over on Lee’s blog got me thinking about comparing my acceptance rates with the stock site’s reported averages.
Site
My Acceptance Rate
Average Acceptance Rate
istockphoto
48%
59%
shutterstock
39%
40%
dreamstime
55%
49%
fotolia
48%
123rf
89%
bigstockphoto
79%
72%
canstockphoto
55%
Averages
59%
55%
Hmm, interesting I used to be right at the average over at Istock, but an entire batch was rejected because of a bug in Aperture. Taking that into account, I’m pretty much just above average everywhere.
Acceptance is a funny thing, with random swings at each of the sites. The big lesson is to submit many small batches to avoid the bias of a particular reviewer. That seems to help. Also, you can request another look at Shutterstock and Istock (through Scout).
There has been much discussion recently about Istock’s somewhat alarming drop in visitors and ranking relative to the other big stock sites. See what I mean below:
This drop in traffic corresponds almost exactly with the drop in sales I reported last month. Hopefully this rebounds fast because I really love Istock and want to see my sales there increase!
I looked at the apple site last night and sure enough, all the local apple stores should have iphones today. So - I went down there at 8:15am and stood in line until 11:45am when I was ushered into the store. We were sweating in line because folks with vouchers from yesterday kept cutting the line and the manager kept saying they were almost out of phones! But, I finally got in and after a couple of technical glitches (a systems error and then getting a 910 area code), I finally walked out at noon with a 16GB black 3G iphone!
Let me know what you think! I’m not ambitious enough to make my own from scratch and so I settled on one of the nicer pre-made themes. I’ve also updated my homepage with new images (
I love it! The only site I haven’t been able to use with it is Yahoo (I can’t login there..). What is everyone’s experience with Chrome? I wish they had a Mac version already!
I’ll probably end up using both Picassa web albums and Smugmug.
