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.

A little experiment. Let’s repeat the above graph, but with a logarithm scale for earnings. Anybody here has bad feelings towards logarithms?

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