Stock Photo Update

Lost Forever

In three weeks I'm going to hit the one year anniversary of my first download from Istock. Right now I've had 891 downloads, worth a little over $485 to me. I'm pretty sure that I'll have hit $500 by March 1st. I've cracked $100 This month and last month.

Here is a month by month breakdown, although I'll probably have at least 15 more downloads this month.

03/06 : 1
04/06 : 4
05/06 : 7
06/06 : 30
07/06 : 63
08/06 : 90
09/06 : 93
10/06 : 103
11/06 : 82
12/06 : 101

01/07 : 169
02/07 : 147 (So far)

It is going pretty well I'd say. A lot better than I had imagined.

I have 200 photos uploaded which means that my photos have averaged $2.43 each over the course of the year. I do have to point out that 74 of my images have never been downloaded. I also want to point out the fact that not all 200 of my photos were uploaded at the beginning of the year, in fact many of my early photos haven't sold at all, and many of my top sellers didn't get uploaded for six or more months later.

I guess there are several reasons why the average earning is important. The most important being that they throw out the stat that if you average ₤2 per photo from your rights managed stock, you are doing pretty well. The idea being that you have 10,000 photos in your portfolio. ₤2 in Canadian money is about $4.54

It would appear that I'm a little behind as far as doing pretty well, but like I said, not all my files were uploaded right from the very start which dilutes the yearly statistics a little.

In fact I only had one file the first month and then the next month only three more were added. It takes a little while to figure out exactly what good stock photography actually is, and particularly what will sell. It doesn't seem like it should be, but stock photography is an entirely different type of photography than any other genre which is weird because you can cover all the same subjects. You just shoot them differently.

Well, I guess I write more on the subject later. I hate to be constantly writing about the same thing, but I this is what is important to me right now and it is better than not writing at all.

In a brain flash, I just realized that how to decide what to write about would be a very good topic to write about.

-Gary