Am I Really Making Money from Microstock Photography ? Part 1
I started my microstock adventure two years ago in the end of November 2007. I am regularly submitting pictures to 7 agencies (iStockphoto, Shutterstock, Dreamstime, Fotolia, StockXpert, Bigstockphoto, 123RF), and when I have time to a couple more.
Every month I am posting here a microstock earnings report with nice graphs like that one above. Usually, I can show a positive growing trend in my earnings. A few other microstock photographers and illustrators also share their sale numbers in a similar manner.
However, this is not a full story. We do not see here any information how much of expenses and labor is invested in producing images for microstock. Is it just a hobby providing a supplemental income or business? Am I really making any money here?
I will try to answer these questions. Let’s start with including expenses to a popular measure of portfolio productivity – RPI (return per image).
You can simply calculate your RPI for a given agency by dividing amount of sales in a given month by size of your portfolio. The above graph show my RPI for four selected agencies. These numbers may be useful to analyze trends or for comparison with other photographers.
However, I would like to have a single number to characterize my entire microstock production. It is a little bit tricky and arbitrary to derive a single RPI for multiple sites.
After 2 years I have quite different portfolios in various agencies. My iStock portfolio is the smallest one due to uploading restriction. Fotolia portfolio is not much larger (my acceptance rate in only 58% there). Shutterstock has the highest number of my pictures. It is interesting that my IS portfolio contains some unique pictures which were not accepted by SS, DT or FT.
I don’t think it is a good idea to add RPI numbers derived separately for my pictures at different sites. My first appraoch was to use a size of hypothetical averaged portfolio as reference (just an average from 7 agencies – khaki color thick line above).
Finally, I figured out that it is really not so important what and where was accepted. It really matters what I actually produced for microstock. So, now I am looking for all jpg files in a microstock folder on my hard drive (thick gray line). These include pictures which were not submitted for some reasons and pictures which were not accepted anywhere. I also have a few duplicate versions, e.g., pictures resubmitted after corrections.
I believe a total number of pictures prepared for microstock better represent my efforts than the “average” portfolio concept. Of course, it results in a lower RPI as shown above.
However, I do not worry too much how low or high is my RPI. My goal is to increase RPI together with the growth of my microstock portfolio. I cannot explain a peak in my RPI around April 2008. However, after a stagnation period during 2008, RPI is showing upward trend during the entire year of 2009.
During 2 years I produced nearly 1800 pictures for microstock. My recent RPI is $0.84 per image and growing.
In the second part of this post I will introduce my microstock expenses and adjust the above RPI accordingly. We will see if there is any profit left. I will also try to answer a question how much an hour of my work is worth here. Hourly rate of a microstock photographer? It doesn’t mean that I have found a definite answer …
Related posts:
- 13 Months of Microstock Photography Earnings: October | November | December | 2009 January | February | March | April | May | June | July | August | September | October
- My Favorite Camera and Lens for Microstock Photography
- My Microstock Pie – Earnings Split by Agency
- How to Evaluate Performance of My Microstock Portfolio?
- A Reverse Look at Microstock Sales from My iStock and Shutterstock Portfolios
- My microstock referral links for photographers:
Dreamstime, ShutterStock, BigStockPhoto, 123RF, FeaturePics, Panthermedia, CanStockPhoto.
Hi Marek,
really good 1st part. I would like to do something similar in January to summarize the 2009 data. To calculate an overall RPI, I think you suggest the right way and I’m going to use:
1) RPI based on average size portfolio
2) RPI based on the biggest size portfolio (representative of the total number of images prepared for the microstock).
I also will try to collect earnings data from others to make a global statistic table/chart. If anyone is interested, just send me the data of 2009 at the end of the year or drop me a link.
Thanks for sharing,
roberto
Now you are making/thinking on your expenses..
I guess you have few, of course, but small! It “means” that you can produce excellence work and high progress with low expenses, congratulations!
Can’t wait for part II
Hi Marek:
If I understand correctly the $.84 RPI is for 1,800 images and is over a two year period. When you get around to listing expenses it would be interesting to know the expenses on an annual basis and the income on an annual basis. Obviously your income has gone up in 2009 compared to 2008, but I suspect you still haven’t shown a profit compared to the total amount invested.
In order to produce 1,800 accepted images you have also worked pretty hard at producing stock images. It would be interesting to have an approximate figure as to how many hours you spent to produce and upload those images.
1800 is a number of all my pictures prepared for microstock including rejects, pictures not submitted and some multiple versions. So, RPI and other statistics are derived for that entire portfolio.
I have the largest portfolio with SS: ~1500 pictures accepted.
All graphs above are made for monthly values, i.e., RPI=$0.84 is for October 2009.
RPI for the entire 2 year period can be calculated but with some assumptions concerning the portfolio size. It would be $6.14 using the current number of pictures or $12.30 using a rough averaged size of the portfolio during that time, i.e., 1800/2.
RPI is always calculated somewhat arbitrary. I think that its value is not so important, but its trend is. As long as it is rising, I am doing OK.
Any other suggestion, comments or questions? The 2nd part is almost ready.
Great post I think you are on the right track with beginning to put a price on your time.
I think this is why some of the more popular microstock shooters with blogs aren’t adding new images or have abandoned earlier goals.
I think you’re going to make more money doing almost anything other than microstock, though I’m still out there ocassionally adding images after starting in May this year. I’ll be interested to see what price you come up with for time/hr. For me I have a feeling that I’d make more working as a babysitter or packing supermarket shelves.
I think the difficulty with calculating income vs time is placing a value on future earnings.
I’ve also noticed that a lot of the more established photographers are slowing the rate of uploads – but I’d attribute this more to boredom and concentrating on other projects while a relatively stable income keeps flowing in. That’s the category I’m in at the moment – I’m finding plenty of time to take photos, but they never seem to make their way online!
I suspect another factor is that many are diversifying their income sources, and focusing on creating portfolios or services in other segments or markets.
For new photographers it seems to be getting harder to compete with portfolios that are already established.
Hi Marek,
Excellent post! It is very illuminating to take the time and consider your true returns like this. I think it is important you try and express RPI on a per annum basis to make comparison and understanding easy, however as you say it is an elusive number to try and pin down!
It is true also that when you factor your costs and time in it can be a real eye opener but as Holgs states you are hopefully building an asset that will continue to bring you revenue even when you aren’t still working on it. Unfortunately none of us know what the future holds so an accurate estimate of return for your investment over your portfolios productive life is hard to make. However having a decent idea as to the reasonable RPI you can expect can help you manage costs knowing what is sensible to spend in creating new images.
Alex
Nice idea and I look forward to seeing what you come up with. I know the concept of accounting for your time and expenses has been discussed at MSG a lot and it’s definitely tough to calculate because most files take a while to earn back the amount of time you put in. I try to look at everything month to month. How many hours did I put in this month? How much did I make? Did my income increase from last month? I suppose that doesn’t account for all the time spent on all the files in the previous months, but you lose money the first year in almost every business.
I agree that the proper way to calculate the overall RPI would be to start with the total number of images you produced for microstock. If only half the images were accepted (or managed to get online due to upload limits), then that should be reflected in a lower RPI since some of the images are essentially earning $0.
That said however, it is also interesting to know the potential RPI of a site if all images were online. iStock for example generally has a very good RPI when calculating just with the images online. If a photographer calculate with all the images they have created for microstock, the iStock RPI gets reduced significantly.
I thought no one would ever talk honestly about income. I am so new I shouldn’t say anything [ 170 images to date in 5 months ] ! If I include materials let alone time so far its a dead loss but an interesting tutorial in what DT thinks the market wants. I signed exclusively to DT but now find permitted uploads have gone from 10 to 5 now down to 3 per day despite an acceptance ration of about 47%. I find it icredible that anybody can make $1200 per month unless they are illustrators or full time professional photographers. Does exclusivity mean all images must be submitted to one microstock company or only that submissions must each be exclusive ? It would be very helpful to understand that question. Thank you for being upfront and honest with your posting at DT. David.
@David
Exclusivity can be on different levels.
Exclusive at iStock means you CANNOT sell RF images anywhere but iStock.
Dreamstime and Fotolia have both photographer exclusivity, meaning all your images are uploaded to Dreamstime and only Dreamstime (or Fotolia or whatever site) and image exclusivity, meaning that single image can only be uploaded at site X.
[...] Marek berichtet in seinem Blog ebenfalls über seine Erfahrungen in der Stockfotografie. Oft untermauert er seine Artikel sehr anschaulich mit aussagekräftigen Diagrammen und Grafiken. [...]
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