8 years, 10,000 pictures
I joined Shuterstock in March of 2008, and after almost 8 years I just reached 10,000 pictures in my portfolio there. Of course, not all pictures were accepted. As of today, I have got about 10,700 pictures created specifically for stock. It is a real challenge to keep a balance between production and creativity here.
To put things in a perspective, Shutterstock has over 70 million stock photos, vectors, videos, and music tracks online.
Credit to photographer?
I visit quite often my local Barnes & Noble bookstore to sit with a cup of coffee and browse through books and magazines. Almost every time I am finding one of my pictures somewhere inside or even on a cover like last time in Ancient Healing Secrets book. Unfortunately, if the picture was bought from Shutterstock the credit goes to the agency, not to me. That’s a not so nice side of being a microstock photographer.
Sales in microstock agencies
I upload my pictures to several microstock agencies, but these 7 provided more than 90% of my revenue within last 12 months:
35.7% – Shutterstock
18.8% – Fotolia
16.3% – iStock
8.0% – Dreamstime
5.5% – BigStock
5.1% – 123RF
4.1% – DepositPhoto
Fotolia contribution is growing (29% in January 2016) while iStock is going downhill. My results are somewhat differ from the monthly poll in microstock group.