Hey folks

We teamed with Steve Heap to explore his earnings in more details than anybody before. The goal was to explore his portfolio 'half-life' over at different agencies, however we also made a deep dive into his best-sellers and their impact on earnings.

Check out a new blogpost "How passive is income from microstock photography" https://xpiksapp.com/blog/passive-income-microstock/

Really curious what do you think about it and if you agree with conclusions

Thanks to Steve and your work for this data.

It would be interesting to chop the files count by lifetimes earnings at a finer slice - and then graph the total earnings by # of files - what is the sweet spot - is it really images that make ~80$ each, or more like ~50$ or what?

I still think there are a number of things out of our control that make the difference between a decent seller and a top seller - mostly those are the vagaries of sales and the how the sites decide to display the images. I'm sure Steve has produced more images of his cat and I suspect that some have done well and some not well at all - and as you say - it is hard to impossible to predict which ones will perform better - and the fact that some images do great on only one site suggests that it can be as much the site as the image itself. Still, producing a lot of good content is the most likely way to get decent and top sellers.

I suspect that Steve's top earners from 2020 are due to his recognition of trends - probably mostly around Covid and producing images that met those trends in a timely manner - well done. My facemask images produced early in 2020 didn't go anywhere, but it was a pretty half-hearted effort and I didn't have any old theater marques to play with.

I think timeless images could have a very long 1/2 life especially compared to current trend images - the fall off of sales is more due to how the agencies treat them than the images themselves. Stuff like wildlife and landscapes could age very well - unless the agencies just push them down over time solely based on their age - in which case maybe you should just re-upload everything every 10 or 15 years or once there are no sales after a certain period - in fact this is something that could be done automatically by a program even after you are no longer putting any effort into image production. 

My personal best seller at SS had daily sales until one day it didn't - it went from a top line on page one for a one word search to nowhere in the top 10 pages one day and the sales went away too. I think predictions for how sales would be 10 or 20 years out are on very shaky ground. I think with a large enough portfolio sales will go down to some low level and then putter along at that level - until the sites change something or technology like AI images comes along and they go down even lower. We have some historical data for the last 15 years or so, but the changes in the industry over that time are enough that predictions based on that data are pretty suspect.

I think the best seller sales over time graph would be easier to read if the 0 was the bottom line on your graph - not some point in space above it.

I guess the real takeaway is no secret - consistently produce images that meet a need and upload them to a lot of sites and you will get a lot of sales and once you stop producing images sales will fall off - rapidly at first and then more slowly.

However, the diagram about the earning per agency and year clearly shows that until 2015, the majority of sales come from just two agencies, Shutterstock and Getty/iStock. In 2017 Adobe Stock joins the club. Only in 2016 the earnings are mor evenly distributed. Also the share of the medium and low earners diminishes over the years, again with the exception of 2016. in 2022, the three leading agencies earned more than three quarters of the overall earnings.

If you get to a different result by multiplying earnings per image with files per category, your calculations must be flawed.

I'm not sure I follow your logic. You are referring to 2 splits of earnings: 1) per agecy per year and 2) per range of earnings per file. Ranges of earnings are like ($0-1, $1-7, ...), but files are of all agencies together. They are sliced too differently, in my opinion, and it seems to me that you're trying to use one for conclusions about the other. Can you try to explain again what do you mean?

I don't know that much about the half-life of images, and something that causes images to lose their earnings potential, aside from just plain aging, is competition.

Yeah, totally.

However, we estimated the half-life of sales exactly, if that makes sense. I believe that sales of the image include all of the factors (ranking changes by agency, competition, becoming out of date etc.).

the 30 day moving average graph for the cat pic

Oh, now I see it. I agree, point taken.

A large Portfolio and lots of agencies flatten the RPI curve. So the monthly graph of the cat image is not important at all.

There's not a single RPI chart in the blogpost (if by RPI you mean "return per image"). Monthly graph of the cat image is used to show that, when approximated with a line, earnings are reducing.

What do you mean by "this chart is not important at all"? "At all" for which purposes?

RPI is always earnings per portfolio size.
Earnings of a single image ist not important.

What does then RPI stand for word-by-word? e.g. what does the "I" mean?

But there's also no chart in the blogpost that shows Return Per Portfolio, which, I believe, would be calculated something like (total sum of earnings) / (number of portfolios). There are only absolute numbers per portfolios, so that the differences are visible, when they are put together.

Or do you mean some other way of calculating "Return per Portfolio" that in your opinion was actually used in the blogpost?

Hey folks

We teamed with Steve Heap to explore his earnings in more details than anybody before. The goal was to explore his portfolio 'half-life' over at different agencies, however we also made a deep dive into his best-sellers and their impact on earnings.

Check out a new blogpost "How passive is income from microstock photography" https://xpiksapp.com/blog/passive-income-microstock/

Really curious what do you think about it and if you agree with conclusions

Very interesting subject / read. As I approach retirement this will play a bigger part in my planning. I doubt I'll ever stop working 100% and will most likely submit work to a couple of agencies albeit at a reduced volume focusing on a couple of key subjects but it's interesting to learn how fast the income is likely to drop. It looks like it should provide a tidy amount for 10+ years and probably longer with a little extra attention along the way. Thanks

Quote from: t�tar�t� on March 03, 2023, 04:49

The cat images sell some months above average, some months below. But overall this single image is not much important for his yearly income. So i would not focus on a single image,

We are nowhere focusing on the cat image. The earning downward trend for cat image (Steve's best-seller) is shown to demonstrate of what we will do for every image of his portfolio in order to estimate for portfolio half-time.

Estimation is hard for separate images precisely for the reasons you mentioned. The ultimate goal of the article was to estimate that on the portfolio level.

P.S. RPI does not matter much at all in my opinion because it is too detached metric.

Sorry, maybe i am to focused at the best seller cat.
Interesting report. Thanks for your work.
 

Has Steve Heap ever visited this forum or via a username by any chance?

Has Steve Heap ever visited this forum or via a username by any chance?

steheap

https://www.microstockgroup.com/profile/?u=1036

My personal best seller at SS had daily sales until one day it didn't - it went from a top line on page one for a one word search to nowhere in the top 10 pages one day and the sales went away too.

Ditto

The results are roughly what I expected.

I created a series of 52 instructional videos in the late 1990s.  I was hoping for "make once, sell forever" products. Basically a video form of microstock (a decade before I started with microstock). 

Sales were great at first, and then tapered off.  What I found was that every time I put out a new video, it not only started selling the new videos, but it ALSO kicked up the sales of older videos.  Basically, the new videos brought in new buyers, who then liked them and went back to buy older ones in the same series.

I stopped making videos after 9/11. I had an artist that was supposed to fly in from London for a shoot that day, and all planes were grounded. We lost momentum, and then decided it wasn't worth the effort we were putting in. Thus, we had a distinct cut-off date for new videos.

Sales followed the lines very similar to this study. A bit of a peak after I announced no new ones would be coming, as old customers came back to fill in their collections.  Then fewer and fewer every year.  Our last sale was in 2018, where we sold a grand total of 2 copies (1 each of two videos to one individual).