I hit another minor milestone with my micro-stock career at the end of December, making my first $100 from the service, which is the minimum payment amount. Here is how my time with the service breaks down. I successfully passed the application process to upload content just under two years ago, and sold my first picture a mere 4 months later. In the two years since I started, I’ve uploaded a total of 57 images, and sold 18 of them, over a total of 58 separate transactions.

The sales are very skewed though: more than 60% of my downloads are for a single image of a giraffe that I took at London zoo nearly 4 years and two cameras ago. Given the fairly random nature of the shot, it reinforces the fact what is going to sell is something of a lottery. There are a couple of exceptions to this: people who are well known to either the industry or podcasting community, and the hardy perennial pictures where you have a group of ethnically diverse models with great teeth, standing around a whiteboard either laughing politely or looking intense.

These shots, destined for PowerPoint presentations and marketing materials the world over, sell pretty consistently. They also require the aforementioned models and a studio. But this is clearly a high density sector so what you have invested in has to stand out, though there is more room for artistic post production with models than the wildlife or travel shots I’m producing. So you pays your money and takes your choice…

For whatever reason, my giraffe snap has turned into a nickel and dime producing perpetual motion machine: it’s had enough hits now to rank fairly high in the results – if even-toed ungulates float your boat, that is – to guarantee ongoing exposure.

My patterns of submission have trailed off significantly in the last 8 or 9 months as I’ve joined the hordes in the Apple Developer Program [sic] and have subsequently disappeared into the special section of purgatory reserved for people who don’t know what they’re doing with Xcode. I will make a point of submitting some of the India wildlife shots this weekend, and shall squander my earnings in a binge of MP3 purchases.