I received the shocking email about the change in Shutterstock royalty rate couple of months ago. If you do not want to read all the way down then this is the summary: The new Shutterstock royalty rate is $0.1 per download. Yes, you heard it, $0.1 per download.

Please, find below my "Top performers" at Shutterstock until now (March 2018). For each of these photos, I earned more than $20.

September 2017 was my second best month ever ($95.02). I was second after February 2017 ($104.46), my only 3 numbers earning so far. I have 738 pictures in my Shutterstock portfolio.
What made this September nice was 4 "Single and Other" download.

After 15 months, I finally reached my first Shutterstock milestone. Despite last month slow sale, I reached the $500 total earning.

Despite the fact that February only has 28 days, it was my best month ever since I joined Shutterstock. I had 4 video and 70 photo downloads which gave me $104.

I celebrated the end of 2016 with my first "Enhanced License" sale at Shutterstock with the photo above. I earned $13. I hope there will be more to come!

On November 14, 2016, I sold my very first video at Shutterstock. It was a sweet $19, I hope it was more though!

This is just a quick note on my Shutterstock earning. I have been a Shutterstock Contributor since end of April 2016. So far I have 500 pictures + movies online. In my first post, I said that I was not doing great with microstock. However, in the last few months, I started to enjoy uploading new pictures, even uploaded more photos at Fotolia, because I started to earning about $30 a months at Shutterstock alone. While it does not sound much, my overall earning of $247 will be enough for another photo accessory (maybe extra flash or second hand lens??).

This is the Part 2 of this article about Shutterstock and Istock earnings. In Part 1, I was analysing the question "why new image are not selling well at Shutterstock anymore?".
Enough bla bla, let's see the stats ...

I became contributor at Shutterstock and Istock in mid April. In the last few weeks, contributors at Shutterstock where complaining about no sale on newly uploaded file and drastic drop in their earning. I felt like my earning at Shutterstock dropped as well while my earning at Istock seems to increase. Also, indeed, new image sale at Shutterstock did not happen any more.

I want to share with you the analysis I made in order to see if my intuition was right. Please feel free to leave a comment or share your experience.