Critcal Mass

[Martin B]

Here is a question that may have been asked before, but not finding it, I will risk asking it again. For contributors averaging 5 or more sales a week, what was the number of images you had uploaded before sales became steady? I see people with 5 or 6 thousand images who seem to be doing steady sales, but that many images would probably be on the low side. I'm taking into consideration that not all portfolios are equal, quantity aside, as some photographers will produce images that sell better than others, and some are just better photographers. Just trying to get some round numbers in my head as I whittle the hours away in Photoshop.

[Southpole]

Someone on this forum told me on average 1 sale per 1000 images in your portfolio

[DDoug]

11 minutes ago, Southpole said:

Someone on this forum told me on average 1 sale per 1000 images in your portfolio

So, if average, north of 20K images to have 20+ sales per month.

[Lisa]

I have very consistent # of annual sales, based on 2,000 images.

2014= 57 2015= 63 2016= 57 2017= 64

 

[Martin B]

1 hour ago, Southpole said:

Someone on this forum told me on average 1 sale per 1000 images in your portfolio

month or week?

[DDoug]

1 hour ago, Martin B said:

month or week?

I believe the average Southpole quoted is per month. Based on that, Lisa's sales volume is 2.5 times average.

[hdh]

I believe it is a general misconception that quantity alone is driving the number of sales per month within a portfolio. 

There are many factors driving the number of sales of which quantity is only one. 

 

Other factors -without guarantee for completeness - that drive sales, are 

 - quality of the pictures, tightly edited good quality pictures sell much better than the average snapshot 

-  diversity of the portfolio , a portfolio of a million pictures of one and the same flower ... 

-  demand of the market, shoot motives sought after by the market (AoA helps to grab some of that) in hindsight  

-  availability in competition, if there are few or no competing pictures, sales go up, where there are many it goes down. An example for the latter  may be flowers, the former - if I only knew (and then I would not tell either ) 

 

All of those factors work together in more or less complex mechanisms;

A portfolio that had a load of pictures in superb quality, not available by any other photographer may sound a great portfolio to start with.

But if there is no demand in the market for these pictures .... 

 

Btw, I fell for that misconception as well, and am now working on these other factors. 

  

Last not least, prediction of sales is a dark art that only very few - if any - people are capable of

[Martin B]

4 minutes ago, hdh said:

I believe it is a general misconception that quantity alone is driving the number of sales per month within a portfolio. 

There are many factors driving the number of sales of which quantity is only one.

3 hours ago, Martin B said:

 I'm taking into consideration that not all portfolios are equal, quantity aside, as some photographers will produce images that sell better than others, and some are just better photographers.

 

I'm pretty sure that was covered in the opening question.

[hdh]

2 minutes ago, Martin B said:

I'm pretty sure that was covered in the opening question.

 

 

Might be; 

How valid would an answer to the OP question be, if it were not to cover any other factor? 

Can it be answered credibly, ignoring other parameters? 

[Martin B]

4 minutes ago, hdh said:

 

 

Might be; 

How valid would an answer to the OP question be, if it were not to cover any other factor? 

Can it be answered credibly, ignoring other parameters? 

 

3 hours ago, Martin B said:

 For contributors averaging 5 or more sales a week

Seriously, (not trying to be contentious) it could only be answered credibly by someone who is "averaging 5 or more sales a week", which I would assume would be someone with more than 10 thousand images and up. But idk, so that is what I was trying to gauge. What I was asking is, at what point did you hit critical mass and start getting regular weekly sales. From what I have seen, no one with under 5 thousand images has reached that point. If the other parameters (including quantity) are lacking, I guess they can't really answer the question anyway, because they are not yet there.

[andremichel]

31 minutes ago, Martin B said:

 

Seriously, (not trying to be contentious) it could only be answered credibly by someone who is "averaging 5 or more sales a week"...  From what I have seen, no one with under 5 thousand images has reached that point. If the other parameters (including quantity) are lacking, I guess they can't really answer the question anyway, because they are not yet there.

There are exceptions. The average may be 1 per month per 1000, but there may be extreme cases of 10 per month per 1000 or 1 per month per 10,000. Take wiskerke for example. He only has 2500 images but probably meets your criteria 

[Martin B]

8 minutes ago, andremichel said:

The average may be 1 per month per 1000, but there may be extreme cases of 10 per month per 1000 or 1 per month per 10,000.

You have over 10,00 images up, and they look like well executed, marketable images. Are you getting 10 sales a month on a regular basis? I mean you don't have to answer that one way or another if you would rather not for various reasons. I'm just trying to get an idea of what is or isn't possible on here. Alamy lets people know they have over a 100 million images up, with like half a million new images added every week,  but they never say how many total sales they have out of all of those images.

[Colblimp]

I'm now AVERAGING 3 sales per month, with my tiny port I'm very happy.  I've had at least 3 sales every month since last April, when I had less than 1,000 images.  This year for instance is:

Jan - 5

Feb - 11

Mar - 8

I'm expecting my sales to increase as I grow my port and I'm excited for the future!

 

[andremichel]

39 minutes ago, Martin B said:

You have over 10,00 images up, and they look like well executed, marketable images. Are you getting 10 sales a month on a regular basis? I mean you don't have to answer that one way or another if you would rather not for various reasons. I'm just trying to get an idea of what is or isn't possible on here. Alamy lets people know they have over a 100 million images up, with like half a million new images added every week,  but they never say how many total sales they have out of all of those images.

I was getting 20 sales per month for several months until last month where there was a sharp drop to 11.

[andremichel]

Given the extremes, you can't use other people's figures to gage what you will earn in the future.

[Bryan]

Have to agree with Detlef  that there are too many factors at play to allow a valid generalisation here.  

 

For example If you have access to events and shoot successful live news, and maybe deleting the surplus, you may be doing very well on a shots per month basis, or maybe you have specialist knowledge and access to a niche subject area etc, etc.

 

Also the situation is dynamic, today's average will not hold good tomorrow, competition is building all of the time.

 

From my own experience I made 213 sales last year from around 10,000 images, so in terms of sales per month per 1000 that works out at about 2. However, when I look at the rate of increase of sales, there was a sharp decline last year, despite uploading many more shots.

 

 

[Martin B]

3 minutes ago, andremichel said:

Given the extremes, you can't use other people's figures to gage what you will earn in the future.

Wasn't the purpose of the question. I don't plan on counting anything I earn from sales on Alamy as income. Or counting on anything. Every dollar I make on stock sales goes toward camera equipment, as if I don't have too much already.  But I have over 50,000 images on my computer that I need to edit through, with another 20,000 negatives and slides that need to be scanned. That will give me something to do during the long winter months when I am not out shooting or fishing.

[spacecadet]

1 hour ago, Martin B said:

 but they never say how many total sales they have out of all of those images.

Based on my own average, last year's turnover and an exchange rate of 1.40 it's somewhere around 750,000 a year.

[hdh]

58 minutes ago, spacecadet said:

Based on my own average, last year's turnover and an exchange rate of 1.40 it's somewhere around 750,000 a year.

beware of British understatement! 

[Richard Baker]

I could tell you that with 20k images on here with an average of 200 sales a year. Given the work needed to get them on in the first place, that doesn't sound very much, does it - although Alamy is not my prime agency.

 

That said, I have no pictures of Robins perching on branches, no lifestyle, no saucy women, nothing with property-releases (and only a few with model-releases) plus just a handful where I've needed to look up a Latin animal/plant species.

 

My point is, any of our collections are inevitably going to be different so the idea of average here is pretty innacuate, given our subject/interest bias. 

 

Richard

[RedSnapper]

I have , currently,  about 49,000 images, and consistently sell 100+ every month........solid editorial , illustrative content, a good number of model released lifestyle,  little or no travel, fly on the wall, walkabout documentary, 'people doing stuff' .....

 

km

[Doc]

I started selling over 5/week in 2012 when I had about 9-10K images with Alamy. I now have 22.5K images and usually sell 15/week (75/mth); mainly travel and editorial

 

Kumar (the Doc one)

[andremichel]

1 hour ago, Doc said:

I started selling over 5/week in 2012 when I had about 9-10K images with Alamy. I now have 22.5K images and usually sell 15/week (75/mth); mainly travel and editorial

 

Kumar (the Doc one)

How come you are selling 3x as many with only 2.2x the images of 2012, while the competition had grown from 25 million to 125 million?

[Alex Ramsay]

My sales became pretty consistent when I hit the 5000 image mark (a couple of years back), and have so far remained so, climbing steadily (if modestly) in proportion to my image total.

 

Alex

[Doc]

1 hour ago, andremichel said:

How come you are selling 3x as many with only 2.2x the images of 2012, while the competition had grown from 25 million to 125 million?

Hi Andrew!

 

Don't really know - I think my rank improved during that time, though it is now about the same as it was then (top of p4 for anyone still looking at BHZ!)

 

Kumar