Canstock = Comeback Kid

Remember Canstockphoto? If you answered no, I’m not terribly surprised. They’ve been on life support for the last two years and until recently I saw virtually no movement in my account. But someone’s awake at the wheel now and all signs point to a revival since their recent merge with  fotosearch. In the past few months I’ve noticed a sharp jump in sales from the fotosearch site coming directly from my portfolio at Canstockphoto

Photosearch sales at 19.80 USD

I’m now pleased to report that I’m getting more than just pocket money from Canstockphoto . The reason? Images from my portfolio on Canstockphoto are now also automatically added to the fotosearch library. If you have a collection with Canstockphoto you’ll notice big jumps in your sales history tab, and at 19.80 USD per sale you don’t need much to get a good income going. Not bad at all!

User-friendly upload….NICE

Along with the structural changes came a well organized uploading and batch processing feature that virtually makes it possible to upload your entire portfolio in just a couple of hours, or in my case with almost 20,000 images, maybe a weekend—pretty impressive.

The ease of Canstock’s processing system is really impressive. When I first tested their system, I had a couple of suggestions for CEO Duncan Enman, which I sent on over. They took my advice and within of a couple of days the features I described where programmed and launched. Impressive response! 

One of the things i requested was a sort order that allows for us photographers to sort our images after date on the EXIF data when attaching model releases. This creates a natural order, because this option sorts the images so that the first images in the shoot are presented first and so forth. This means that images of model XXX are presented right after each other in an coherent fashion.

This high standard of “listening to your photographers” would have been much appreciated at other agencies with slower and more tedious uploading procedures. For now, we can be happy that Crestock, Canstockphoto, and Yaymicro have gotten it right and will enjoy undelayed uploads of new content from their contributors.

Numbers…$$$

With only about 8% of my total collection online at Canstockphoto, it still produced $120 USD for February 2009. This is quite impressive. According to these numbers Canstockphoto should be able to produce about $1500 USD per month for my whole collection (100%). This would actually rank Canstockphoto with-in the top seven cluster of best selling sites (just below Dreamstime, Bigstockphoto, Crestock, but above 123RF).

After doing the math I immediately started uploading again and got my assistants working full time on it.

Good comeback Canstockphoto!