Thursday, January 25, 2007

Smart is Sexy

The other day Tracie and I went to the library to shoot some photos for istockphoto and we got a couple of really good ones. Especially Tracie, she got three or four that I really really like. This was from the best series at the library.

House sitting is going well, we're having a good time. Work is going well, we're just about ready for the cap and gown kids.

I feel kind of bad talking about work and istock so much/often but those two things are really taking up a lot of my time.

I hit 700 downloads this month. The last 100 of those came in the last two weeks. I'm uploading a lot more this month because I've been sparked into action so to speak, I can see that I could easily make a pretty decent income.

If I could be doing 15 times that well it would replace a full time job. The thing is, I wouldn't actually need 15 times more photos to do that well, because better more useful files sell more often. Realistally, the best 10% of my photos account for 62% of downloads. With 280 more photos that do as well as my best 20 photos right now, I would be there.

Another point is that some of my 20 most downloaded files might not even be my most profitable photos right now, because the new files could simply be too new, to be in the top 20 most downloaded. A one week old file probably has no chance of getting the same amount of downloads as a file that has been online for a little under a year, in such short a time.

Of course, they always talking about the ebb and flow of downloads. I could just be experiencing a short span of higher than normal downloads. We'll see how it averages out over the next few weeks and months, but I remain confident. I don't really have very many seasonal images. My top sellers aren't really dependant on it being christmas or valentines day for people to want them.

-Gary Milner

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