Leaf had an interesting question in the Microstock Group Forum - What are your lifetime microstock goals?

Like many photographers, my goal would be to travel all over the world. I would love to have the resources to drop everything, fly to Europe and shoot for a month. I would like to see Africa, revisit the Great Wall of China, freeze my butt off in Alaska. Life is not a journey, it’s an experience. For me, traveling would be that ultimate experience.

My top places to visit, not in any particular order:

1 ) Hawaii - I want to take my parents to Hawaii before it’s too late. My grandmother wanted to visit Hawaii and never had a chance to visit. My mother has internalized this dream herself and I feel like I must make it happen.

2 ) Australia - home of my best friend and kangaroos. What better way to spend winter in NY than NOT IN NEW YORK?

3 ) Africa - Kenya, Egypt. I would love to see the desert and the sand. View the pyramids and see old Cairo.

4 ) Italy - mainly Venice, Rome and Tuscany region. To drink wine and float down the rivers (I’ve heard gondola rides are not all that in person - I’d still like to!) And spend a relaxing week at a home in Tuscany - relaxing so far from everything I know.

5 ) The Galapagos Islands. They were on my short list of honeymoon destinations. I would like to see things you can’t see anywhere else, to experience what Darwin saw. I am about the experiences and nothing can beat seeing creatures that just shouldn’t exist, living in the wild.

6 ) Ireland. Green and castles. That’s what I think of. And rain. I would love to see the old Irish land, castles emerging from the hillsides. Stonework, architecture - what a great getaway.

7 ) Alaska - there’s something about being thousands of miles from anything you’ve ever known and in a situation beyond your immediate control that feels freeing. I speak from experience having spent a year in Korea alone. Alaska is another exotic must on my wish list.

8 ) New Orleans - strikes me as something everyone should do once. An interesting place, from all I’ve heard.

9 ) All 50 US States - what can I say, I’m a guy who likes statistics and completing tasks. 50/50 is a great stat!

10 ) Cheju Island, South Korea - I was ill and had a twisted ankle the first time I went. I would like to go back, healthy and ready to see the island for all it has. I had so many beautiful ideas about my trip there and they turned out to be … less than ideal. I would like another chance at Cheju.

How do you make all your dreams come true?

Sorry if any of these photos are yours - I didn’t write the site, I just find it amusing!

http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=stock_photos

I read a lot of microstock blogs - every one that I know about. I hear a LOT about RPI, return per image.

This stat has no value, month to month. I’m sorry, but it’s true. It’s an interesting stat, but has no value. Sort of like innings pitched for baseball or blocks per 48 minutes for basketball. (Kenny George averaged a triple double per 48 minutes last year for UNC-Whatever…he still didn’t get chosen in the NBA draft).

RPI has no value for two reasons:
1) As your collection grows, older stuff gets pushed aside and newer stuff makes the majority of your income. RPI would have more value if you only counted your top 200 images every month. Then you’d at least have a measurable stat. By measuring your lowest images as well, you’re saying “well, I made 10 cents per image this month and 11 cents last month so my RPI is down” - so? Last month you had 650 images and made $71.50 This month you had 900 images and made $90. Your RPI is down but income is up and those new images helped increase you $28.50 or 11.4 cents per image. Basically, the older images can hold you down.

2) As the stock agency’s collection grows, your RPI is absolutely positively *always* going to drop. The only thing you can do about that is increase your gallery faster than the market increases. If market share increases 3%, increase by 6%. Your RPI may go up - it may drop. In the end, your earnings *will* increase.

RPI is not a terrible stat. Statistics should help us - they should show us a path and lead us to a new plan or future. What RPI shows is a snapshot but it’s not comparable month to month. I made $82 with 161 images online. RPI of $.50 Last month I made $400 on 1000 images. RPI of $.25 OH NOES - my RPI is tanking! I only increased income 5x but my RPI dropped.

So RPI - dead to rights. Forget it. If you’re not increasing your portfolio, your earnings will drop. Older images sell less. No news there. If you’re increasing your portfolio, RPI will rise slightly then drop. Every.single.time. No news there either guys - sorry.

If you truly care about your RPI, dump your worst 10% of your portfolio every month - your RPI will triple.

Simple and to the point this month, like my month of work.

Overall gallery increased from 5777 to 9052 but that was mostly the result of adding YayMicro and 1100 images as well as pending May images finally being reviewed.

Overall income increased to a record $524.84 and 5 agencies had a Best Month Ever despite me doing basically no work.  Not a bad month, but I hope to dramatically improve it in July.  That was disappointing.

If you want to make a million dollars in microstock photography, you need to have a plan.  You need to know what it will take to get you there and then you need to do the work that you planned.

The “issue” we have most frequently is lack of images to edit & submit.  I can edit & submit quickly.  My issue is always with having enough to edit.  So the one issue we’ve struggled to address lately is how to create *many* more images - enough that I would never again worry about our lack.   We created a plan - one I’ll be drawing out over the next few months - that will give us enough images to change where we are in stock photography.

Currently we have just over 1k images up at most stock sites.  By January 31st, 2009, we expect to have 7500 images online with our plan.  According to most major lists we’ve seen (StockXpert, Dreamstime, Istock) that would put us in the top 20 of all microstock portfolios, behind only megastars in our industry.  That would be a start.

Our plan is repeatable.  If it works the way we envision in the fall, we’ll repeat it in the spring, then again after next wedding season.  By the end of 09, we believe it feasible to have 15-17k images online.  At that point, we’d be top 5 largest microstock galleries behind IOFoto, Andres and perhaps a few others by then.

Again, I’ll be sharing more details as we go along - be sure to check the comments too as I’ll drop hints along the way there too.  It’s going to be the autumn of a lifetime.

Well, there may be something good to come of all this for June anyways.  Even though I’ve been too busy to upload, the good is that I can examine what happens if I stop working for a month - and so far there are some surprising results.  Shutterstock, for example, is a site where you must “feed the beast” and always upload.  Yesterday was my best Saturday in 6 weeks even though I haven’t uploaded a new shot in awhile. 

Another benefit - all of my Qs are caught up except Fotolia.  DT, BSP, SXP - all at 0 pending.  So as of June 30, I should have a very accurate count of my “going into summer” portfolios! 

Are there more benefits to not having uploaded in a couple weeks?  I’m not sure.  I haven’t had enough time to contemplate it.  I hope to actually get some images edited this coming week and then uploaded asap.

Very cool - I am one of the Featured Photographers of the week at BigStockPhoto.com

 Click here to view the image or go to their site to see it live.

Wedding season here last from May through October.  For those 6 months, my life changes from full time stock mode, part time photo business to full time wedding photographer, part time stock guy. 

- Are we still setting up model shoots: yes. 
- Am I uploading everyday: no.
- How many weddings by month:
* May 2
* June 4
* July 4
* August 6
* September 5
* October 3
- How many images in the edit queue: 216 to edit, 881 new to sort through
- How many model shoots in June: 4 so far.  Hopefully 10.

The big question you wonder is - is it worth checking N2M over the summer then?  I think the answer is yes.  This is my first season trying to balance our wedding business with stock so if you enjoy the challenges I give myself, the goals I’m trying to reach, and my attempts to get there, you’ll enjoy N2M this summer.

If you have other questions about N2M or my summer, let me know in the comments - I’ll answer there within a day or so.

Uploading is going very well so far in June - much faster than expected.  I realized last week that we were about $560 from our next Shutterstock raise on June 1st.  $557.38 exactly.  So my goal is to make a real Shutterstock increase and go from $300s to $500s in one month there.

To reach goal, I needed: $557.38 in 30 days or 18.75 per day.

After 4.5 days, I have $76.95 and now need $489.80 to make the next level, or $19.20 per day.  I have a new batch of images in the queue and a good push coming but obviously I’ve never made more than $10 per day average so $18 and $19 are hard goals.  Last month we averaged $9.99 per day.  That’s the record for us.  We need to about double it in one month.

I *will* hit this goal.  150 new in queue, more coming - we’ll get there.  I want the raise to kick in July 1st or before.

Every industry has what I like to call a v.2 player. Who are some v.2s?

Google, MySpace, Apple’s Ipod, Ebay, IPhone.

A v.2 player is a business (or product) that didn’t exist until later in the relevant cycle than other players. Google came much later than Yahoo, Altavista and Go.com Myspace followed Friendster and the IPod followed many failed MP3 players. IPhone success blows away even the Blackberry, not to mention other cell competitors.

The main feature of a v.2 is their education came free. They are able to learn from the predecessors and do something unique, something different, something essential - right from the start. They gather the type of momentum that simply devours the competition and blow them off the board (How’s auction.com doing?)

If we were to have anything resembling that right now in microstock, it would be YayMicro. Yay has come out of the gate strong. They have the most essential pieces of the puzzle already in place - a fantastic site that everyone raves about; a clean, simple brand; a memorable name; and most importantly - a strong starting collection of images. Images of McCain, Obama. Images from top contributors such as Lev Dolgachov and IOFoto.

I recently joined the YayMicro site and love everything about it so far. They seem to have a plan (editorial=big market, creative=another big market, ease of use all around=more people using it). We’ll see if it plays out that YayMicro is the v.2 of the microstock industry. Someone must be. It’s about the time we see someone emerge to absolutely destroy the competition - maybe it’s YayMicro.

Check out YayMicro here and let me know what you think of them!