Annual Review of Stock Photography 2020

Time to look back at a very unusual year and not just in Stock Photography! It is fascinating to think about all the changes that we have lived through in just one year with some pretty major changes impacting us all in our profession (or hobby) of trying to make money from our photography. Of course the biggest change that impacted newer and smaller contributors significantly was the decision by Shutterstock, with little notice, to completely rework their contributor payout approach. Gone was the increase in earnings for being a good and loyal supplier to their agency and in was a percentage based approach that paid more to contributors that earned the most (for Shutterstock). In retrospect, I can see the reason that they took that approach – I was on the top tier and could have continued to earn that without adding a single new asset, but the way they did it took many people’s breath away. They fudged the math to hide how much they really earned from their subscription customers and underpaid contributors as a result, and then they reset everyone to the lowest percentage in January which only benefits one entity – yes, Shutterstock themselves. Many contributors voted with feet and closed their portfolios, but many, many more stuck with it. It is hard to give up what, to most, is their biggest earning agency. Still, I’m not here to moan, but to give you an update on what I saw during the year and what lessons I learned from that.

Annual Earnings from Photography

Firstly, the top line number. In 2019, I earned $35600 from all my efforts in selling my artistic efforts! That includes Fine Art things as well as the stock agencies. That was fractionally lower than 2018 but I managed to actually grow this total in 2020 to $36,475. That brings my lifetime earnings (since 2008) to $291,860. A tidy sum, indeed.

I’m very pleased with that result after a year in which the typical images (travel oriented in my case) dried up as travel itself was highly constrained. Without my normal travel activities, I definitely slowed down in terms of my new images and videos as you can see from this graph:

Still, I ended the year with over 16000 assets at some of the agencies. Less at Shutterstock where they implemented their no similars policy during 2020 as well.

It is usual, in my annual review, to look at how efficient I am being in terms of earning from the work I do. I calculate the earnings that an average photo achieves across all my agencies. This is an imperfect science as not all images are on all agencies. Some are rejected and some agencies don’t take editorial shots, but with a bit of behind the scenes mathematics I do try to come up with a reasonable view:

Wow – an uptick in earnings!!! I remove videos from this and also remove the larger Fine Art sales, so this is how much I earned, each month, from an average photo on the stock agencies I submit to. It is amazing to look back to 2015 when I was earning three times as much on average. I’ve been depressed by this in previous years (and it is still not great), but I do realize one thing after 2020. I did do pretty well from new “non-travel” images that I created in 2020 as I will explain, and if I was able to calculate the earnings from one of those it would be much much higher. I realize that going to a place and taking a couple of thousand images, editing it down to 1000 say and uploading those will give you a big portfolio, but not necessarily a great income stream. One image that meets a market need with earn a 1000 times more than an image of some old building in Portugal. Of course that is obvious, but I think that is behind quite a lot of the trend above. So don’t read this to say that I could have earned $9000 in December rather than $3000 – it is more likely that the true answer would have been $4500 or so, if conditions today were the same as in 2015.

Stock Agency Performance

The annual report is when I look at how the individual agencies have performed during the year. Here is the overall picture:

I’ll also add in a graph for the final quarter of 2020 which shows a trend I want to mention:

They are both telling a similar story – there are three big agencies for me in terms of earnings (although Canva with its great offer of doubling March earnings for the rest of 2020 made them a very successful agency for me.). What the fourth quarter graph shows is that Adobe Stock and iStock are showing growth against the other agency, which is great to see.

What these graphs also show, is how the smaller agencies may not sell much themselves, but collectively they make a big difference to the overall earnings. I use Stock Submitter extensively (now with its online brother, Microstock Plus, to order my keywords for Adobe and Alamy, put in the matching keywords for iStock and then upload and submit to all these agencies. One click and the image is uploaded and submitted. That saves me a ton of time and also makes it possible to upload to the smaller agencies and gather the cash from those.

This chart shows how Adobe is showing that growth. I do have one from another agency which is showing a continued drop month by month without a break and you can perhaps guess which one that is:

The downward part was the old Fotolia days, the upward trajectory was the transition into Adobe and now we are on a stable path where the link between adding a new image and overall earnings is much more stable. So keep up the good work, Adobe!

How I managed to keep growing in 2020

In a word, focus. I stayed focused on the news and discussion topics. I also started my Premium section of the website to share things that I thought would make an interesting concept for stock. That had two impacts on me – it provided a little income for my efforts, yes, but it also forced me to keep thinking of new things and concepts to write about. For instance, well before the world really started to talk much about the Coronavirus, I wrote this post in January about the worrying signs and how creating coronavirus images would be a good idea. It was a premium post but I have “unlocked” it. I came back with further ideas in this one from March. I’m saying this because what I clearly did in 2020 was to create new images each month to illustrate the growing issues of the pandemic which have really paid off for me. I don’t have a specialized studio, but I bought a few props (face masks pretty early on, then little test tubes for blood tests and so on) to create close-up shots that illustrated the issues being discussed.

Of course, I was lucky with one shot that was a bit of a grab shot at the time, but which became my standout earner of 2020:

This one has earned $1050 during 2020. Now is that luck or just forward thinking? A bit of both I am sure, but unless you are thinking of what you can take and upload, you will never get those lucky breaks.

I hit another smaller break with a forecast that voter fraud and also evictions would become a big story So back in June I started on some simple eviction ideas and also mail-in voting concepts. I know these are probably US concepts, but as I have said before, the US is a big market for stock photos so always create with that in mind (as well as your local variants of the theme).

This image (and the similar versions) earned $420 during the year:

Incidentally, I do have failed concepts as well! I thought it was a neat idea to use some small Playmobile people to tell the story:

Total earnings for this little beauty – $0.97…

But really my point is that you need to try every concept you can think of and watch what authors and journalists are using in terms of headline images to get their stories across. Your aim is to get an image that catches on as a key way to grab the viewers interest by telling the story at a glance.

As a result of all this studio activity (plus two trips to Hawaii that I managed to get in before lockdown) I have earned about $6000 in 2020 from images and videos created in 2020. Yes, I get more for being a long time contributor on Shutterstock, but I am not aware of any particular benefit I get in terms of searches for new images.

Looking forward into 2021

I’ve been surprised how slow the start to 2021 has been. I’m not sure what is driving that (certainly the 10c sales on Shutterstock aren’t helping), but all the agencies just seem to be slow in terms of daily sales. It is far too early to predict that is the outcome for the year, but it also falls into one of those “well what can you do about it” questions! I prefer to think about things I can influence, which is new imagery that will address the questions in 2021. Vaccines are obviously a big topic so I have made myself some of those:

Note the simplicity of the design – the bottle, the droplet of vaccine on the syringe and the hint of the story in the background. I’m not saying that this is my next big seller (to be honest I was late on this one.) I wrote about this in early December I think, but didn’t get round to buying the props until the end of that month. So I can only blame myself if I am slow off the mark. I would also like to improve my stock of images for holidays (valentines, easter, mothers day etc.) I am sure there are coronavirus variants of those themes I could do!

Until then – happy shooting!