Microstock Photography Earnings – March 2009
Lee Torrens at Microstock Diares mentioned that microstock is up and his March earnings report confirms that. However, I got somewhat mixed results from my portfolio. My revenue went up almost 14% in comparison to February. Taking into account that March is 10% longer than February and my portfolio is still growing in size about 8-9% every month, the March performance was actually lower than February.
Microstock earnings and payments from March 2008 to March 2009
I managed to increase my average microstock portfolio from 776 to 859: 98 new pictures in SS, 78 in DT, and 49 in IS. So, my submissions were a little bit higher than in February.
Shutterstock with one extended license performed as expected providing 50% of my earnings. I have now more than 1000 pictures in the SS portfolio.
iStock went down a little bit, but its good performance in February was due to one EL. A single EL has still significant impact on the performance of my small portfolio.
Dreamstime sales were also down with the end of month really slow. Site upgrading? I had problems with pictures uploading.
Now good news. All my smaller players (SXP, FT, BSP, 123RF) were up and reached their BME in March. StockXpert moved to the 4th place in my portfolio and it looks promising (reaching payout every month).
No sales at Featurepics. I started to upload pictures to CanStock and got one $0.30 subscription sale from about 400 images online. Another $0.25 sale at Crestock from 20 pictures I managed to upload there before giving up with them.
| agency | portfolio size | downloads (EL) | earnings | % earnings |
Shutterstock |
1007 | 750 (1) | $309.41 | 49.9% |
iStock |
629 | 96 | $116.95 | 18.9% |
DreamsTime |
827 | 57 | $54.28 | 8.8% |
StockXpert |
995 | 89 | $48.4 | 7.8% |
Fotolia |
665 | 55 | $37.40 | 6.0% |
Big Stock Photo |
922 | 26 | $34.5 | 5.5% |
123rf |
965 | 18 | $19.05 | 3.1% |
| 859 average |
1091 total |
$619.63 total |
March was my 16th month in microstock with $3631 of total earnings.
March was also time for me to work on 2008 taxes. I don’t have a lot of net income from microstock photography since most of my earnings were reinvested in equipment. However, I have some other streams of income from internet which help this business running.
Some other bloggers are reporting monthly earnings from microstock:
Microstock Diaries … Microstock Experiment … NiltoMil … jrtb … Driftless Ramblings … bankizdjec.pl … MeLastMohican’s Blog … Probably Due To Network Congestion
| My latest stock photos on Dreamstime |
Related posts:
- 13 Months of Microstock Photography Earnings:
2008 February | March | April | May | June | July | August |September | October | November | December | 2009 January | February - 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.




Your curves are still going up quite impressive !
March was definitely better than February for me
http://microstockexperiment.blogspot.com/2009/04/march-2009-earnings.html
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