Is it just a hobby providing a supplemental income or business? Am I really making any money here?

I started selling my pictures through microstock almost two years ago in November 2007. Today, I have about 1800 pictures in my stock portfolio. Since I am using Adobe Lightroom 2 to catalog all my pictures, I can easily sort them according to camera and lens.

There is always a lot of discussion among photographers which microstock agency is the best performing one, which belongs to the “Big 6″, is it Big 6 or Big 5, 4, …

After 18 months I have my portfolios in 8 agencies with some regular earnings. These portfolios differ in size and, also, in content. The differences will grow in time. I expect to to have two times more pictures with SS than IS soon.

Let’s take another look at my microstock earnings from iStock and Shutterstock. Time on a horizontal axis in the two pictures below has double meaning: time of uploading (submitting) pictures or time of downloading (sales).