Where are my monthly microstock earnings reports? I stopped posting them … December 2009 was the last one. I was busy shooting recently. And, those monthly graphs got a little bit boring. However, I am going to write some more general posts on trends in microstock photography from my own perspective.

I am trying to follow my microstock business model as described in my earlier posts: Am I Really Making Money from Microstock Photography ? Part 1 and Part 2. I treat microstock photography as a part time job (1/3 of my time = about 60 hours/month) and I tried to keep all related expenses below 30% of total sales.

How that business model works for me in practice? I ended the 2009 year with a little bit more than 40% in expenses due to a new Canon 5D/II camera with two lenses I bought by the end of the year. My expenses should go down to 30% when looking together at 2009 and the first half of 2010. However, I am not sure if my 30% model is sustainable in a long run unless I significantly increase my sales.

60 hours per month? Well, I am sure I am doing some overtime … I could record hours spent at my home table top studio and in front of a computer, but it would be difficult to clearly separate my part time microstock photography from pictures shot just for fun during paddling or hiking (some of them are ending up in my microstock portfolio).

I gathered 30 months of data including sales estimates for May 2010. So, let’s look at some trends.

Trends in my microstock sales from November 2007 to May 2010:
green bars – monthly additions to my portfolio, thick yellow line – total monthly sales,
green, blue and red lines – linear approximations of sales (trends)

Green bars in the above graph represent my work invested in microstock – monthly additions to my portfolio. These are all jpeg pictures processed for microstock including rejects. Thin yellow line shows my total monthly earnings. I approximated that curve with segments of a straight line to show some trends. I can see three distinct periods.

1. Green line – 10 months from February 2008 to October 2008. Slow, but steady growth at about $19/month. In March of 2008 I got accepted to Shutterstock, so I was submitting to all major microstock agencies. At that time, I was producing around 40-60 pictures every month.

2. Blue line – 12 months from November 2008 to October2009. It was a year of more rapid growth in my sales: $96/month. I believe it was a delayed response to the increased number of picture submissions. Between September 2008 and June 2009 I was making from 80 to 120 pictures every month. My earnings were dominated by Shutterstock, but iStock contributions were growing and passed SS in June 2009.

3. Red line – 8 months from November 2009 to May 2010. Slowing down in total sales! $45/month. IS is still growing, but SS sales showing a stagnation since BME in October 2009. I am producing and submitting fewer pictures during recent months, only about 60 per month. But, wait a minute! My pictures are not supposed to be better now? I am spending a similar amount of time shooting and processing with improved skills, a better camera, more expensive props …

Well, I will not try to make any predictions here. Next, I will show some trends in different agencies. iStock dominates my earnings nowadays. OK, but now, back to shooting!

Not many photographers are ready to reveal their financial data, but maybe you could share one piece of information. What percentage of microstock earnings do you spend to cover your expenses including investments in photo equipment?

My latest stock photos on Dreamstime

Some related posts:
Am I Really Making Money from Microstock Photography ? Part 1 and Part 2.
December earnings report
My microstock referral links for photographers:
Dreamstime, ShutterStock, BigStockPhoto, 123RF, FeaturePics, Panthermedia, CanStockPhoto, Graphic Leftovers, Deposit Photos

My profit (after expenses) from microstock photography stayed at the same level of $1000 during the last three months of 2009 year. It happened to be my microstock goal for 2009. However, I was rather lucky in December.

I produced a similar number of pictures for microstock as usual (~65), but mostly during the second half of the month during Christmas time. Earlier in December I spent a week at American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting at San Francisco. Of course I was shooting pictures whenever I could, but I doubt if a visitor to San Francisco can shoot anything what hasn’t not been shot before. Anyway, I extended a little bit my San Francisco portfolio. It was fun.

Sales in all of my microstock agencies except one went down in December. The most dramatic sale reductions happen in Dreamstime and Shutterstock even with a couple of ELs. BigStockPhoto showed a slight increase but well below its BME.

The situation was saved by iStockphoto. It was showing a slight increase of revenue with comparison to November. Then, a day before Christmas, I got a nice gift in the form of three extended licenses. This put IS out of scale and, now, I have problems with my performance graphs.

Microstock earnings, payments and profit after expenses from December 2008 to December 2009

Now, we see beter the performance of my smaller players like Fotolia, StockXpert, 123RF and BSP. My earnings from CanStockPhoto and Veer Market Place are not very consistent.

I don’t have clear goals for 2010 yet. I am probably going to keep my microstock involvement at the same level, i.e., 1/3 of my time or ~60 hours per month. My general goal is to improve my microstock productivity in terms of anhourly rate and try some new things both in photography and marketing.

Some other bloggers are reporting monthly earnings from microstock:
Microstock Diaries … Microstock Experiment … NiltoMil … MeLastMohican’s Blog … Microstocking or Ministocking

Related posts:

• 13 Months of Microstock Photography Earnings: November | December | 2009 January | February | March | April | May | June | July | August | September | October | November
• My Favorite Camera and Lens for Microstock Photography
• My Microstock Pie – Earnings Split by Agency
• 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.

My latest stock photos on Dreamstime

November brought a slight drop in my earnings from microstock photography. I was quite busy last month adding 67 pictures to my portfolio – 1823 pictures in total with the largest selection online with Shutterstock – 1565.

iStock, Shutterstock and Dreamstime provided 81% of my microstock earnings. My RPI (return per image taking into account the entire microstock portfolio) was down to $0.79 in comparison to $0.84 in October and $0.73 in September.

I added a profit line (earnings minus expenses) to a graph below. What it is included in expenses I explained in two previous posts Am I Really Making Money from Microstock Photography ?

I just completed 2 years in microstock photography. November was my 2nd month with a profit above $1000 (well, slightly above).

Microstock earnings, payments and profit after expenses from November 2008 to November 2009

iStock. BME, 44% of my microstock income. 43 new pictures added. $0.92/download – same as in October.

Shutterstock. 26% of my earnings. 65 new pictures added. $0.45/download (1 EL and 11% from “on demand downloads”) – lower than in October.

DreamsTime. 11% of earnings. 54 new pictures added, $1.13/download. A pretty slow month, but my earnings were saved by an extended license in last hours of November. Abandoned farm house on Colorado prairie is one of my favorite HDR pictures.

StockXpert is going down, but there were still sales from Jupiterimages (30%), Subscriptions from Photos.com are gone.

Fotolia is going down since BME in September.

CanStockPhoto. One big sale from PhotoSearch and a few smaller one.

Veer. $35 from 31 sales and I am ready for the first payment.

123rf. Much slower than October.

Big Stock Photo. Same as October.

Featurepics. I reached the payout level in October after 2 years, got my payment in November. One sale worth $2 last month indicate that the next payment will be in the end of 2011 …

Some other bloggers are reporting monthly earnings from microstock:
Microstock Diaries … Microstock Experiment … NiltoMil … MeLastMohican’s Blog … Microstocking or Ministocking

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
• 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.

My latest stock photos on Dreamstime

Two years ago in the middle of November 2007 I started my adventure with microstock photography by submitting a few pictures to iStockphoto, and then to Dreamstime, Fotolio, 123RF and Bigstockphoto. It took me much longer to get into Shutterstock (4 attempts) and StockXpert (5 attempts).

On November 28th, 2007 I got my first sale at iStock just 8 days after uploading this picture of a hot air balloon shot a few weeks earlier at the Hot Air Balloon Harvest in Greeley, Colorado.

Here are my first two posts related to microstock (I moved them from the old blog):
Starting Microstock Photography
Polaroid Transfers for Microstock?

These two years passed really fast …

To proceed further I need make some assumptions and guess estimates.

After two years of microstock photography I consider myself the part-timer. I have half time in a regular job and some other streams of income in a self employed mode. It means that I can share different expenses between my self employed activities. I am not planning to work a full time for microstock.

I do not keep records of my hours spent on microstock. That wouldn’t be fun … My estimate is that I am working about 60 hours per month, i.e., 1/3 of my time. I am doing this quite regularly shooting a 3-4 times per weeks and processing and submitting a few pictures almost every day. No special shooting campaigns or “power weeks.”

I am analyzing here 23 months from December 2007 to October 2009. To build a portfolio of 1748 pictures I needed 1380 hours. It results in about 46 minutes per picture.

After months of experimentations my stock photography is focusing now on a table top subjects and concepts in my home office/studio. I enjoy a lot of outdoor activities (paddling, hiking, biking) usually with a camera. However, sales of my “recreational” pictures are too low to justify counting these trips into expenses and labor time related to microstock. However, I take into account time needed to process these outdoor pictures for microstock submissions.

Some short trips are planned specifically for microstock shooting. It is sad that shooting a local sewage outlet is much more profitable from microstock perspective than visiting Rocky Mountain National Park or other scenic destinations in Colorado where I live.

I keep my shooting costs very low. No model fees, cheap, often eatable, props. Two years ago I bought a new camera, Canon EOS 40D, with two lenses, a diffusion tent and couple of lights (see My Favorite Camera and Lens for Microstock Photography). Last month I upgraded to Canon 5D Mark II.

So, my microstock expenses are mostly related to camera equipment and some software (Photoshop, Lightroom). It is important to note what I am not including here: computer, internet access, home office expenses (these are covered by my other income streams).

To include monthly expenses in this analysis I will use the following formula:

Now, I can replot my return per image as “net RPI” which includes expenses. For reference my October 2009 numbers are as follows: net RPI=$0.59, average portfolio RPI=$1.01, and entire portfolio RPI=$0.84.

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.

It would be nice to know how much an hour of my time spent on microstock is worth. Hourly rate of a microstock photographer? Is it more profitable to flip hamburgers at McDonald’s or do babysitting as some suggest?

Unfortunately, there is no simple answer to those questions. There is no strong link between amount of work invested at given month and sales at that month. Our pictures are selling with a long delay in time. I was trying to analyze this problem in one of earlier post: A Reverse Look at Microstock Sales from My iStock and Shutterstock Portfolios. If I stop submitting pictures to microstock right now, my pictures will be still selling and make money.

More importantly, you shouldn’t really expect profit when developing a business, i.e., building your microstock portfolio. Taking into account my total earnings from microstock during the last 23 months and my total working time leads to $4.70/hour – not very impressive, perhaps, but it’s growing.

I believe it would be more reasonable to look at the earnings, expenses, RPI in longer time periods than a month: annually or quarterly. However, since I am spending the same amount of time on microstock every month, I can calculated my hourly rate for each month showing profit. $17/hour in October 2009 is around a double minimum wage in US. I will be satisfied if it grows up to $30/hour.

I record all my numbers in an Excel spreadsheet, so I can easily change my assumptions or include additional expenses. I don’t have a business background, so my approach and terminology may be somewhat naive here. I am trying to develop a framework to analyze my net microstock earnings to have some control in what I am doing.

I would appreciate any comments and suggestions. How to improve my approach? What I am missing? If you would like to share your experience we can consider a guest post in this blog.

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 …

• 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.

October was quite successful for my microstock photography. I added 80 pictures to my portfolio. Sales are still growing: BMEs for most of agencies, $1478 in total sales, $250 more than in September. iStockphoto, Shutterstock and Dreamstime provided 80% of earnings. My RPI (return per image taking into account the entire microstock portfolio) was up to $0.84 in comparison to $0.73 in September and $0.71 in August.

Microstock earnings and payments from October 2008 to October 2009

iStock. BME and #1 with 42% of my microstock income. 59 new pictures added. $0.92/download – lower than in September due to increasing number of Xsmall downloads within $0.20-0.30 range. I guess I am producing pictures for bloggers.

Shutterstock. BME. 71 new pictures added reaching 1500 files, $0.50/download (1 EL and 14% from “on demand downloads”). However, last 6 months in SS were rather disappointing. In October I made only $34 more than 6 months ago in April despite of “feeding the beast” regularly, adding 387 new pictures and jumping to higher payment rate during that period. Before April 2009 I had almost a year of constant growth in SS.

DreamsTime. BME. 52 new pictures added, $0.85/download. It is getting more and more difficult to get my pictures accepted there (too similar …, lack of concept …).

StockXpert. BME. A great performance with 70% of sales still coming from Jupiterimages and Photos.com. The last good month?

Fotolia. Slightly lower earnings than in September. 44 new pictures added, $0.90/download.

123rf. BME with $44.50 (more than double September earnings). I started to rotate pictures in my “favorite” collection. A coincident?

Big Stock Photo. Slow, but steady. No significant change from the previous month.

CanStockPhoto. Just one big sale from PhotoSearch and a few smaller.

Panthermedia. I started to upload my pictures in the beginning of this year. I have 550+ pictures in the portfolio and almost 100 waiting for inspection. I just reached the 2nd payout.

Veer. $16 from 12 sales. I have uploaded my entire portfolio there.

Featurepics. $12 from 4 sales. Finally, I reached my first payout of $50 after 2 years …

I am one month short of completing my 2 years with microstock. I will be posting more statistics and comments in next few weeks.

Some other bloggers are reporting monthly earnings from microstock:
Microstock Diaries … Microstock Experiment … NiltoMil … MeLastMohican’s Blog … Microstocking or Ministocking

Related posts:

• 13 Months of Microstock Photography Earnings: September | October | November | December | 2009 January | February | March | April | May | June | July | August | September
• 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
• What Sells in Microstock? My List of Picture Bestsellers
• How to Get Accepted by ShutterStock? Don’t Give Up!
• My microstock referral links for photographers:
  Dreamstime, ShutterStock, BigStockPhoto, 123RF, FeaturePics, Panthermedia, CanStockPhoto.

My latest stock photos on Dreamstime

Let’s look at cameras first.

Canon EOS 10D: 50 pictures (2.7 %) I started submitting pictures to microstock with my first digital SLR camera. Canon EOS 40D: 1500 pictures (81.5%) Very quickly, I upgraded my old 10D to Canon 40D and this camera still remains my microstock work horse. Shortly after, I bought the 40D, a new model, Canon 50D was introduced.

Pentax Optio W10 and W30: 10 pictures (0.5%) I use these compact waterproof cameras for paddling, racing, and other outdoor activities to provide images and video clips for my blogs: Paddling with a Camera and Fitness Paddling. These pictures are generally too noisy for microstock. Nevertheless, I am selling a few of them in microstock portfolio.

Unknown camera (scanner): 250 pictures (13.6%). I scanned some of my old Polaroid transfers, watercolor abstracts and some other background textures, played a little bit with scanning 3-dimensional objects. This activity provides some fun and variety into my microstock, but not so much of income. I have been using Epson Perfection 4870 photo scanner for years.

Most of my microstock images were created with Canon EOS 40D camera. Let’s look at lenses I am using with this camera.

Canon EF-S 60mm f/2.8 Macro: 1150 pictures (77%). I bought this lens together with my Canon 40D camera. It is my mostly used lens for microstock photography. It works perfectly for macro and product shots in my home office with just 9′ of working space. I used to take it also for outdoor shooting before I got a zoom lens.

Canon EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS USM: 300 pictures (20%). It was my second lens purchased for Canon 40D funded from microstock earnings. I am using it as general lens for outdoor photography and in my studio when a wide angle is needed. I take it as a single lens for my paddling, hiking or biking adventures.

Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS: 40 pictures (3%). A great lens, I love it, and, unfortunately, I don’t use it that much for microstock … I got it before my microstock time.

Canon EOS 40 D camera with EF-S 60mm f/2.8 Macro lens are my mostly used tools for microstock photography (more than 60% of my portfolio). The above statistics also shows how microstock changed my photography during last 2 years from outdoor (landscape, nature, sport) to tabletop or rather some sort of photo illustration.

Is it time to upgrade my camera equipment? A full sensor camera?

It looks like I would need Canon EOS 5D mark II camera with EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro lens …