Yuri Arcurs Home of the world’s top selling microstock photographer

This guide is about the tools I use on a daily basis to make decisions about the distribution of my images. The concepts described here are powerful tools that enable you to get your thoughts and concerns about your stock income boiled down into precise and comparable numbers. Knowing your RPI, Half-Life and MPM is lifesaving!

Return per image (RPI)

Inventor: Tom Grill

When talking about stock photography there are a few concepts and terms that help to clarify the discussion. Here I have tried to put together the concepts and tools I use when talking about stock among other stock professionals. A lot of the concepts here are unfortunately unknown to a lot of photographers in both micro and macro but are used often at conferences and in talking about stock in general. If you are a professional stock photographer perhaps you should read the "advanced stock theory" instead.

Microstock 

This graph is based on my income alone and may not be completely accurate. It describes how much income a non-exclusive stock photographer gets each day on a normal week. It is interesting that Saturday is a bit lower in income compared to Sunday. Perhaps people are a bit hung over from Friday

Just recently I did an independent survey to find out how much time it takes to submit images already uploaded to all the major microstock agencies: The time it takes to attach model release, categorize and so forth. The results are shown below and are quite surprising.

Shutterstock 14.70 seconds per file with MR.
Dreamstime 32.07 seconds per file with MR.
BigStock 37,95 seconds per file with MR.
iStock 437,09 seconds per file with MR.
Fotolia 67,25 seconds per file with MR.
123RF 8,89 seconds per file with MR.
StockXpert 11,90 seconds per file with MR.
Crestock 4,01 seconds per file with MR.

In the industry of selling licenses for the use of pictures in advertising, magazines etc., known as “stock photography”, there are generally two major traditions: