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It's interesting to look back on the microstock experiment I started a few years ago. I have been quite lazy this past year about uploading anything--and expected my sales to dry up because of it. While the sales have definitely not been through the roof, they do continue on slowly and surely. A certain percentage of the sales are coming from about 5 or 10 of the most popular images but a large percentage of sales continue to come from the bulk of the images in my portfolios that are not particularly popular and get downloaded only rarely. In addition to the random photo downloads, every now and then one of the few footage clips I've added will get downloaded, a photographer joins up with my referral code, or a buyer will sign up for a subscription from my link.

I've been averaging between $80 and $100 a month all year* $125 a month since the experiment began in Feb. 2005. Now my question is how many images do I need to upload to have a nice enough (and steady enough) side income to reduce my hours on my day job and use that time for writing, or art?

The theory of the Long Tail seems to have something to say to this phenomenon:

Anderson argued that products that are in low demand or have low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, if the store or distribution channel is large enough. Anderson cites earlier research by Erik Brynjolfsson, Yu (Jeffrey) Hu, and Michael D. Smith, who first used a log-linear curve on an XY graph to describe the relationship between Amazon sales and Amazon sales ranking and found a large proportion of Amazon.com's book sales come from obscure books that are not available in brick-and-mortar stores. The Long Tail is a potential market and, as the examples illustrate, the distribution and sales channel opportunities created by the Internet often enable businesses to tap into that market successfully. (Wikipedia)

Of course, the Long Tail and I have met before... Most of my blog traffic probably is in the long tail area of random Google hits on obscure old posts, since I'm so irregular about making time to update this site. But I guess that's fine with me for now. Someday, when my microstock monthly earnings increase enough, perhaps I'll write more regularly.

*Edited after I did the actual calculation

Related:

• My experience with microstock sites (so far)
• More on Shutterstock
• More on Dreamstime  

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Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved.