I’ve been doing microstock for a little over three years. In that time, I’ve pondered going exclusive at iStockphoto several times, but it just never made sense financially. iStock has always been one of the best if not the best earner for me. It was also the first agency that I joined, so it holds a special place for me. That being said, I’ve always said that I was going to do what earns me the most money. That may sound petty, but this is a business for me. I’m in it for the money. Case closed, or so I thought.

Yesterday, I was reading about iStock’s plans for 2010 here and guess what? They are making it more attractive to become exclusive. Basically, they are raising the prices for exclusives, but not for non-exclusives. The new prices for exclusive vectors are 2, 8, 14, 20, & 25 credits. Instead of 1, 5, 10, 15 & 25 credits for non-exclusives. They are also raising the bar for canister levels by twice as much, so I may never make it to gold. Hopefully, they will lower those a little to placate contributors.

The Numbers

After the news, I had to run the exclusive numbers again. I took my actual iStock earnings and my total stock earnings from the last 4 months. Then, I estimated exclusive earnings at the new prices with larger exclusive royalties for silver (30%) and gold (35%) levels to compare.

I also took earnings from my photos.com and Jupiter Unlimited sales at StockXpert for the last 4 months and added them to the totals above for gold and silver. iStock is taking over those from StockXpert, so I figured the earnings could be similar if I decide to activate them on iStock. Again, I compared those to my total stock earnings from the last 4 months.

After running all the numbers, iStock still wasn’t as much as the rest, but it was so close that it was definitely intriguing. So, I decided to do one more estimate, the future. While I can’t predict the future (big surprise), I’ve done pretty well at estimating what my growth will be at each agency. Predicting the growth at iStock is interesting to me because iStock has been one of the better growth agencies for me despite limited uploads. So going exclusive would give me a lot more uploads and I could grow faster there.

I didn’t add the partner earnings to that, but the picture definitely starts to develop. Exclusivity at iStock will start to pull away from submitting to all the agencies over the next year. I know these are just estimates, but it looks like exclusivity makes sense. Wow! I never thought I’d say that.

What’s Next?

Well, I’m locked in at Dreamstime for about six months, so I won’t be going exclusive anytime soon. That being said, I think I’m going to stop uploading at Dreamstime to prepare for the possibility of exclusivity. I’d like to monitor how the price increase plays out at iStock. Also, I want to review the exclusive terms again to see if I can stomach them. There’s a lot to do, but I have some time to think it all over some more.

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