I’m so glad it’s the end of May!  I can’t wait until tonight to do earnings for tomorrow’s post!  It’s been a great month and I’m excited for the final total.  I know it’s going to be a BME on several sites - in fact, some of them were BME by the 10th or 12th so they are REALLY good BMEs!! 

Today marked the first “full” wedding of my season - which means I have to focus a bit more on my “real” business and a bit less on this “hobby” of mine for a few months.  We hadn’t actually shot a wedding in FIVE MONTHS!  We try not to shoot Dec/Jan/Feb in Syracuse - it’s too cold!  haha  This season is going to be great - even though it could potentially be one of our last 2 years or 3 years.

Subscriptions for the month:
Shutterstock - meh.
IStock - had one, got $2.39 or something around that.  Could live with that.
Fotolia - .23?!  WTF?!  I hope they are kidding.  I fear they are not. 

I’m not organized in my stock world to be full time yet so I’m glad that I am not there yet.  One major goal for June is getting my head on straight about files & folder structure.  Right now it’s a mess of doing so many images in 3 months and never really grasping from the beginning what I needed.  One example of a workflow change that June will bring is that right now, all our model releases are saved in one folder.  When you have 5 models total, who cares?  That’s a perfectly fine way to arrange it.  When you have 50, you no longer know which releases have been uploaded until you attempt to submit photos and there is no release.  Starting in June we will scan all releases to one folder (unsubmitted) and then whenever we do an upload, Sarah will upload the MRs and move them to (submitted) so that we know they are taken care of.  It’s a simple, subtle change but moving the responsibility from me to Sarah and then moving the files between status’ is going to make all the difference for MR uploading.

We finally got our new model recruitment site up at http://www.SyracuseModeling.com  Very simple, very straight - and we have a gallery online to show agencies, etc. in hopes of scoring some new models.  A lot of the wording we are still working on.  It was “borrowed” from Andres Rodriguez’s site (thanks AND sorry Andres).  I’m going to keep changing what it says until I’m 100% happy with it but for now it’s very simple, very easy and matches our model business card perfectly.

My good friend Todd at Arena Creative is now freelancing some graphic design.  If you need something done up, he’s the man. He’s also a stock photographer so I think that helps him “get” us. Also, Todd may be dragging me back into Alamy (kicking & screaming) - no CD? We’ll see about that! I could handle that - except the upsizing.

Here are my ideas for change - I can upload to fewer sites and hope that by focusing, I have more time to get better and more images onto the sites that sell well. Right now the sites that would be most quickly dropped are FotoMind and LO. I have enough images on Canstock that I’m not dumping it - it doesn’t make sense. I don’t have to upload any more but why get rid of revenue of any kind? Oh wait, I didn’t make any last month. My bad.

In order of possible site dumps:
FotoMind
LuckyOliver
FeaturePics
CanstockPhoto
Crestock

All the rest of my sites, I really like. I hope they continue to do well. Also, I don’t want to be bothered with RM right now so I have to look into NOT joining Alamy and being very careful with how much time I spend on FeaturePics or other midstock without a clear plan.

It would be helpful if you knew what I was submitting and how my images looked in order to “judge” the worthiness of reading this blog.  I think in the future we are going to be moving toward much more model/people shooting as well as isolated images as these sell very well for us.  Our nature imagery also sells well on some sites (Shutterstock) and not as well on other (Dreamstime).

123RF

Alamy

BigStock

CanStock

Crestock

Dreamstime

FeaturePics

Fotolia

FotoMind

IstockPhoto

LuckyOliver

Shutterstock (video)

StockXpert

In the beginning, there was nil.

Ok, that’s not exactly true.  My microstock journey began in 2004 - in fact April of 2004 if you ask IstockPhoto.  IStock was the first agency I signed up with following recommendations on a website I frequented at the time.

So where is Nil?  That’s where we need to get to.  Where are we now and where are we headed?

Now - I have 68 files and 1073 downloads on Istock and I’m signed up with another 9 agencies.  I have 2 applications pending as well (Lucky Oliver and StockXpert).  My goal is to be on all 11 as well as eventually sign up with Alamy.

So, current portfolios:
123RF - 53
BigStock - 16
Canstock - 73
Crestock - 0 (new)
Dreamstime - 118
FeaturePics - 0 (new)
Fotolia - 127
FotoMind - 0 (new)
IstockPhoto - 68
Lucky Oliver - (pending)
Shutterstock - 202
StockXpert - (pending)

And since Nil to Mil is a financial goal, I should include those numbers as well.

All-time earnings (& per month)
123RF - $39.98 ($1.88)
BigStock - $26.50 ($1.20)
Canstock - $50.95 ($1.10)
Crestock - $0
Dreamstime - $408.34 ($8.87)
FeaturePics - $0
Fotolia - $112.74 ($5.12)
FotoMind - $0
IstockPhoto - $386.50 ($8.40)
Lucky Oliver - $0
Shutterstock - $1766.80 ($41.92)
StockXpert - $0

My average per month earnings on microstock as of the end of February 2008 was $68.49.  However, I have made $198.75 in the first 2 months of 2008 so my 2008 average is nearly $100 per month.

Last month: $108.54
3 month moving average: $96.15