I didn’t get around to posting earnings at the end of April. It was an OK month with total earnings of $2203 – a big drop from the $2729 earned in March. The biggest reasons for the drop in earnings was a few sites with large earnings in March not following through in April, and Shutterstock was unfortunately down to less than $1000 again. I plan to do a bigger analysis of earnings per site and will post about that later this month. Overall most sites performed OK, with Alamy at $249 and Zoonar at $102. The good news for me is that my Symbiostock site (BackyardStockPhotos.com) sold three images in April (at $20, $10 and $1) and so earned more than CanStock, GraphicLeftovers, YayMicro, MostPhotos, Cutcaster etc. This month (so far) I have sold two images at $20 and $10 and so things are definitely starting to move on that site. To be honest, it is still not paying its way since I moved the hosting to an upmarket VPS server but I’m OK with that. My strategy of uploading my general stock stuff to the main microstock agencies and then putting all the editorial and the better artistic shots on my own site plus Alamy and Corbis should eventually pay off I believe. The proof is still to come, but I am going to keep uploading new images to BackyardStock and not worry about the cost for now.
A second bit of good news from the Symbiostock stable is that Leo, the developer, is working on a streamlined and much faster version of the software. He has learned a lot of lessons from the past 12 months and is applying his learning to a new release coming in a few months. Symbiostock currently has 280,000 images on 179 sites and so is not going away.
My sales in April on BackyardStockPhotos were:
$1 sale for Blog size
$10 sale for Medium size file
$20 sale for full size stock image
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