Another month of earnings from Photography!

September is often the start of the higher earnings season for stock photographers. Summer vacations are gone and everyone buckles down to spending their money on stock photos! Those were the days, perhaps.

This month has a great top line number of $3371, but below the calm surface of monthly earnings, I feel that there is considerable turmoil. I had a feeling all month that sales were not doing too well. I use Microstockr Pro to track earnings among the sites that it can connect to (which is the majority) and I usually see earnings in the $50 to $60 range each working day. Weekends are obviously much less and then I do get days with the occasional big sale that boosts the monthly total. This past month was disappointing though – the daily totals seemed to be slow to take off in the morning and then didn’t often reach that $50 threshold, so my expectations were low. So, what happened? Firstly, I sold a nice framed print that I was commissioned to create for $250. Then I did see some occasional large stock sales that I will mention below. And, finally, Adobe made their payment of almost $750 in my case for the use of images for AI training. End result, $3371.

I realized that my way of just reporting and graphing the totals of all these things was perhaps hiding the thrashing about under the surface and so I’m working on amending my spreadsheet to amortize these one-off payments for free images and AI training across the 12 months and removing the fine art sales from the totals so I can see the underlying trend of stock photos. I’ll report on that in a few days.

So, my usual graphs just represent the totals as I have always reported them in the past:

I did add more images in the month after a trip to Hawaii (on stock photography business!) in August. So my totals are:

Stock Agency Earnings

Of course, the biggest agency in terms of income was Adobe Stock, with $1370, or $626 without the one-off payment. That compares with $684 last month and $838 in July, so it isn’t a sparkling performance for the start of the higher earnings period. Next was iStock (for August) with $490, which was great and then SS with $469 compared to $630 last month. So that was a pretty depressing month at that agency. Canva was not great with $212 after a few months at the upper end of the $200s and Alamy next with $211. Then we are down into the double figure ranges for the other agencies.

Major Sales

The highest individual selling image was actually one from Getty/iStock (from the previous month because of the way they report individual earnings). It was this simple image:

This earned $52.40 which means that the actual buyer must have paid several hundred dollars for the usage! There was also a $41 sale of this image of my usual model with an inhaler:

Shutterstock did help as well, with this $52 sale of a golf course sand bunker and flag.

Shutterstock also sold an image of my local town within about 3 days of me uploading it to the agency:

This was taken while I was waiting for a supermoon to arise last month (which of course it did but was hidden by clouds!). So that little journey was worthwhile thanks to this $35 sale.

I also got $35 for this West Virginia shot (actually a grab shot as I ran down the steps to the viewing area of the New River Gorge bridge while driving back home one evening). It has earned over $1700 in total from stock agencies:

West Virginia also was featured in this sale for $50 from Alamy. A drone shot of the small town of Philippi.

All told (if I count the previous month iStock downloads), I made $465 from sales of images (and a few videos) that earned more than $10. It is amazing how important those are to my overall totals. In fact, my Shutterstock monthly earnings of $469 would be reduced to $277 without these Single Sales.

I think this is all for now – I will be back with my analysis of the real trend on stock photos alone in a few days time.