Exclusive at iStock: 6 months on

Its been 6 months since I became exclusive on iStock. In the last few days, apart from uploading and processing a lot of images, I've been reflecting on how things have changed.

Here's some key points:

• After an initial (expected) drop, my total income is now comfortably above its non-exclusive levels.
• I didn't experience any significant boost in total download numbers
• My revenue per Download (RPD) is now about 3.4 times higher than pre-exclusive on iStock.
• Revenue per image is now at its highest point since I started contributing to microstock
• Daily fluctuations are much higher than previously

In many respects these observations can't be translated into other contributors portfolios - there are many factors that will influence what effect such large changes have on your results, and its impossible to predict how things would have gone if I'd stayed "independent" and put my energies into all the sites rather than just one.

So why illustrate this article with a photo of a frog?

Today's "travel" photo isn't really a travel photo for me at all. Its a green tree frog from the garden of my parent's place in Australia, taken with my then new camera in 2005 - the Olympus E500, the old 40-150mm lens. Its one of the images I've had online longest, and was quite popular on most of the agencies when I was non-exclusive.

It doesn't get many downloads now, however with the one (regular) download it got last week it earned more than it did in the entire time it was online on several other agencies.

More significantly however the iStock royalty structure and sales volumes mean that it becomes worthwhile to produce niche shots (obviously a frog isn't that niche!) that wouldn't have made sense previously.