I earn on average 60% of my income from IS. I don't know if it's because people buy the larger files...not sure why. As far as approvals on average I get 26 to 27 approved out of 30.

I am now producing a lot more photos and am not able to get them on all the sites. I have my husband helping but I am only able to to upload to IS, SS, DT, sometimes SX, and rf123. I can't get to BS or FT anymore.

Am I right by saying that if I go exclusive by the time I hit diamond I can upload 200 photos in a week? It would take me two weeks to upload all my photos. I could only imaging what would happen to my income it I uploaded 400 photos in two weeks.

Does IS still let you try it for 30 days to see if you like it? Can you put your accounts on hold for 30 days or is it a big hassle to do something like that?

You have to delete every single RF image from all the other sites. I think DT makes you keep new uploads on their site for six months. If you don't like istock exclusivity, I presume you have to upload all your images to the other sites again.

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istock-Shutterstock-Bigstock-Mostphotos-Dreamstime-Stockxpert

Just joined BS today, the last box everyone had to click when signing the upload agreement says:

"Once uploaded and approved, you cannot re-claim the photo from being used, and you cannot remove the photo from BigStockPhoto site for at least 90 days."

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Yes, 90 days notice required at BigStock. 6 months at Dreamstime. 400 days at Albumo for those who uploaded to take advantage of the 'introductory offer'.

No exclusivity for me. I just can't see it making more money than having your stuff spread out across multiple agencies. You gotta sell your shots where the designers are...and a lot are going places other than just iStockphoto. I'm on 11 sites now, (regular payouts hit on about 75% of those) and pulled in over double what I did last year. This year, I only added a few sites to my entourage- I think they were Lucky Oliver, iStock, and Crestock. I only uploaded 100 new photos this ENTIRE year of 2007.

You all know too how some sites accept certain photos, and some sites reject them. That's another reason why I'd rather upload all of my stuff to all sites.

Coca Cola would never sell their sodas in just one retail chain, would they? They'd be crazy - and their sales would suffer dramatically. I feel it's the same type deal with stock. If you don't want to spend the extra half hour per batch, uploading to 10 more sites instead of just one...that's your own personal decision.

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s e l l p h o t o s . t k

Top Sellers ? Shutterstock ? Fotolia ? Dreamstime ? BigStock ? StockXpert ? FeaturePics ? MostPhotos ?

Everyone has pretty much stated the reasons why I won't go exclusive with IS.

For me, the biggest reason is the instability of their search. At the beginning of this year, I was thinking about going exclusive, but then one of those search tweaks resulted in a loss of 2/3 of my income from IS. I used to earn several hundred dollars a month...now I'm just barely reaching a payout per month. On top of that, about 2/3 of my photos from the past six months don't even have a sale! Here it is a year later, and I'm actually considering walking away from IS because of the instability.

When sales at one site goes down, sales at another one goes up. That ebb and flow is what keep me afloat.

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Photography by Karin Lau | SmugMug Pro Account | Shutterstock | Mostphotos | StockXPert | Dreamstime | iStock | 123RF | BigStock

I was exclusive with Dreamstime for a while. I know everyone's personality is different so take this with a grain of salt...when sales dropped, I was constantly second guessing with relation to what could be if I was with other agencies. Then, the Terms of Service changed and I was second guessing whether they were fair or not. My volume of sales at Dreamstime, despite adding to the portfolio, have decreased since November 2006. Sure, prices have gone up, but revenues on a month to month basis have also decreased. It's why I changed course and left my exclusive status.

During the process of going exclusive I pulled out of many agencies - some of which I have re-applied and have been rejected because of ever increasing standards.

Bottom line is, the decision is yours. Once you make it, you have to be sure you can live with it - I couldn't.

If you ask me, exclusivity vs. non-exclusivity is a numbers game, plain and simple. Forget all the b.s. that the super-loyal istockers throw around, how they're supporting the best company out there, it's a community, blah blah blah. It's a business, and any decisions about whether to go exclusive there or anywhere else should be treated as such. If istock represents more than 50% of your combined monthly earnings, then maybe exclusivity is a good idea. If istock regularly represents 60% or more of your earnings, then hell yeah you should probably simplify your life and work only with them.

It's also a trial-and-error type of decision. Everyone's portfolio is different, and while one person might do very well at istock, someone else might do much better elsewhere. I think you need to try non-exclusivity for a while and track your earnings carefully before going exclusive.

I'd only do it if my istock earnings hit 60% each month. 50% is a good point to do it at, but I figure 60% is safer in case things go bad somehow and I've got that extra 10% buffer. And I'd only do it if I regularly hit that 60%. If one month istock represents 75% of my earnings, and the next month they represent 30%, it's not going to work.

Treat it that way, and you'll make the right decision. Forget all the other garbage, though. istock will all these ridiculous incentives. They even offer business cards to exclusives. Who cares? At the end of the day, it's about how much you make, and that should be the only motivating factor in making a decision about exclusivity.

Regardling SS, it is unfortunately true that your numbers are only as good as your upload rate. You need to constantly upload to keep the numbers high. I thought that was just a superstition for a while, but it seems that it is more likely fact. So it's not just a matter of average numbers at SS, and how many DLs a guy like yuri can get in a day. He maintains those numbers by constantly being in the process of uploading new stuff, and lots of it. His team is in a regular workflow of editing and uploading, and so they always have fresh stuff showing up and the numbers stay high.

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openpathdesign.com Microstock - A Crash Course

You're rigth, it's a numbers game, and maybe, too, a trust in the future of the company game. So, forget too all the blah blah blah about suppossing that some istock exclusives are exclusives because blind loyalty, fanatic sense of community etc. That's urban legend, maybe feeded by the ones who can't resolve the doubt about going or not going exclusives. And it's tiresome. You can see wohoos and horays in the forums written by exclusives and not exclusives, and you can read that too in any forum of any microstock site. A sense of community can be found in istock and in any other site; it's logic, you tend to make friends at the place where you work (or, if you can choose, you go to work where you alkready have friends), but that's all. Sense of community can be good, but if that mattered so much, you could also have it a istock or elsewhere without being exclusive.

Everyone has different targets, different parallel jobs, different aims for his/her artistic career and different needs of money: these are real factors that add to the number's game.

This is a good point. I think I will track it for the next 5 months. Thanks.