Comparing RPI and STR of stock photographers
(Data for June, 2008)
I thought it would be interesting to compare and contrast the statistics being reported by every micro-stocking blogger I could find 
In my first pass, I’m going to look at RPI (Return Per Image) and STR (Sell Through Rate).
RPI is calculated by taking your monthly earnings and dividing by the number of images in your portfolio. RPI is a good indicator of the performance of your portfolio relative to your own portfolio over time and as compared to others (although some are disputing it’s usefulness).
STR is calculated by counting the distinct number of individual images sold in your portfolio during the current month and dividing that by the total number of images in your portfolio. STR is a good indicator of how marketable the images in your portfolio are. STR is biased by the age of your portfolio though, as over time, more of your images will sell.
As you can see from the data below, my portfolio is right at the average for RPI (7 US cents per image per month). I sure don’t think when I’m taking a picture that it’ll be worth 7 cents per month That’s kind of depressing
| Site | RPI | STR |
| http://www.microstockdiaries.com | .12 | 47% |
| http://microstockexperiment.blogspot.com | .10 | |
| http://www.pixelsaway.com | .08 | 35% |
| http://jrtb.com/blog | .07 | 23% |
| http://niltomil.com | .06 | |
| http://www.driftlessramblings.com | .05 | |
| http://bankizdjec.pl | .04 | |
| Averages | .07 | 35% |
Up next, I’ll correlate RPI and STR with monthly earnings
July 3rd, 2008 at 10:24 am
What’s depressing is that I’m not doing a monthly earning number yet, I’m still just using the running total (looks a little better). I’ll probably switch over to doing monthly numbers next month. The sad thing there is that my .05 RPI is for my ‘career’, if you can call the spare time I put into it a ‘career’.
I’m not quite sure how you calculated the .05 for me. How do you determine portfolio size for this? I have mostly the same pictures from one site to the next depending on what gets accepted. So I don’t think you can just add them up. I don’t have a good count of all the stock pictures that I have right now, but I would think that would be the best way.
And it has to be assumed that we’re only talking about accepted images, I’m not sure there would be a number easily displayable if you took into account the rejected images that I’ve had.
Nice post. I’ll have to consider adding RPI and STR to my table, depends a little on how difficult they are to calculate from information easily available the different sites.
Allen
July 3rd, 2008 at 12:12 pm
Hey Allen
Getting the stats from the sites isn’t too bad. You can find directions on Lee’s site here. To calculate your RPI, for each site I took the total sales and divided that by the number of images you show as accepted on that site. I then average out the RPI for all the sites and divided that by two (is that the number of months you’ve been contributing?). Hopefully that’s pretty close. If you’d like I can remove or replace your number as you’d like.
Lemme know
July 3rd, 2008 at 8:45 pm
I think you just demonstrated why I don’t like RPI as a statistic.
My images are new - they sell well at Shutterstock but haven’t seeped into the search engines at DT and FT. I have almost nothing on a top seller, Istock.
Lee’s images are older - they sell well on DT and SXP but not as well as mine on SS. All that we’re seeing there is the age of the image. It’s fairly common knowledge that older images don’t do well on SS and newer images don’t do well on FT and DT.
On the other hand, if Lee only reported the “top 6″ and I did the same, our RPIs would instantly change (both going way up). It all depends on what you’re showing - if you include all the little 0, 0, 0, 0 sites we all have (or most of us have) our RPI goes down….
Too easy to manipulate this particular stat- and what it shows you doesn’t mean anything without serious amounts of context.
July 4th, 2008 at 6:37 am
Hey Matt
I was wondering when you would chime in on this thread
I completly agree that for your portfolio (very strong at SS), age is going to be a very strong bias on your RPI.
When you’ve thought about this (and for all the rest of you), have you thought about a way to measure the average monthly success of images in your portfolio? Does it matter?
Sense we all post this information every month, and we all use the same numbers, I thought it would be interesting to put them all together like this. If for no other reason that to get folks talking about which statistics are meaningful and what to do to improve your numbers.
I don’t know that I’ve really learned anything from this yet. I’m very curious though to see if RPI or STR is corelated to earnings
July 8th, 2008 at 9:42 am
[...] I’ve been following Comparing RPI and STR of stock photographers with some interest. I think tracking an approximation of the RPI is interesting information, [...]
November 10th, 2008 at 7:13 pm
[...] James, Laurent, Lee, Matt & Yuri all have great posts about RPI. I would urge all of you interested in this topic to check them out. One of the things I love about microstock is how willing the community is to share their knowledge. [...]