Earnings Schedule for July 2008

Earnings kicked booty for July 2008. Whereas, I had been unable to meet the minimum payout threshold of $75.00 at Shutterstock in June 2008 (reaching only $68.57), I easily topped it with $107.88 in earnings for July 2008. If I am able to sustain this rate of earnings, I’ll be seeing payout from Shutterstock every single month here on out, and hopefully that EF 100-400 L that I’ve been eyeing will come within striking range after a year or so. I expanded my portfolio on Shutterstock from 207 to 326 photos, a growth of 57% m-m. Currently, my goal is to add 100 new images to my Shutterstock portfolio per month. Even though the number of images in my portfolio increased, that did not dilute my earnings. In fact, average return per image grew from $.25/image to $.32/image.

I haven’t done anything with Fotolia, and the earnings have been minimal. Sales were certainly better when I had images accepted by Fotolia on a daily basis half a year ago, but I don’t feel that I’m getting a good ROI from this agency. As I had mentioned before, FTP often botches up when I try uploading to Fotolia, resulting in hundreds of duplicate images. I got tired to trying to delete them one by one, and asked the Fotolia support team to mass delete them. They simply said they couldn’t and didn’t try to resolve the problem.

Check back after August 5, 2008, for a first look at the “Shutterstock 500 Derby,” a competition sponsored by Mastering Microstock for the Lost Boys and Gals of Lucky Oliver to see who can reach $500 in earnings on Shutterstock first!

Well, that’s all for today, folks. I wish you a Happy Friday and speedy downloads at all of your microstock sites.

Earnings Schedule for May & June 2008

I joined Shutterstock about ten days before June, but the sales didn't start coming in fast furious until the beginning of June. The only other sites I was seriously invested in were Fotolia and the now-defunct Lucky Oliver. Fotolia has always been slow in terms of sales, but did land me 2 payouts. Lucky Oliver almost got me to payout but then fizzled and shut down. I ended using all my money from LO to buy pictures mainly from Eco, who shoots great National Geographic-esque photography.

Here is an earnings breakdown for May and June 2008.



Conclusion: Shutterstock kicks booty in terms of earning power. I broke 200 pictures in my portfolio right before the close of the month and hope to double that to 400 before the end of June. I see that most contributors at SS making $200 or more per month have at least 800 high-quality photos in their porfolios, so that'll be my goal for this year.