Brutally Boring Stock Photo Earnings – May 2021

Sorry, Alex for stealing your approach, but everything about May seemed to be more of the same. Just look at the columns for May in the graph:

This May’s results of $2759 was almost the same as the previous 4 years of earnings. In May 2018 I had 10,000 images on Deposit Photos, this May I had 16800 – same earnings from a 60% increase in assets. No wonder there isn’t the same enthusiasm for stock photography as there was a few years back. But, putting negativity aside, there are some bright spots although you need to remove your sunglasses to see them!

Just a quick update on file uploading. As I mentioned in previous reports, the rate of uploads has significantly reduced for me with the endless lack of travel. However, I do add a few each month and so my overall growth on three agencies looks like this:

You can see the real easing of the growth curve here on all the agencies I support.

So where are the promised highlights? Getty/iStock continues to be reasonably successful with earnings paid out in May of $481. A big drop from the super $674 in April, but still pretty reasonable. Adobe just beat the $500 mark and SS was in its usual place at $644. But the first highlight came from EyeEM. I had planned to close that account because I thought there was a good chance that my own files on iStock would sell in place of the ones that EyeEM has (there must be many duplicates there). If my own file sells, I get the full amount rather than share it with EyeEM. However, this month they sold some images on Adobe earlier in the month and then came in with a couple of >$20 sales from Getty to bring the total to $95. It is a long time since I have seen that at that agency. Canva was a bit better at $130 although I really miss the long running “doubling” of the previous month which paid out almost $300 a month for 12 months or so. But the real surprise was that my social media efforts seem to be paying off with 4 distinct sales on Fine Art America in May to bring in about $250. Two of them were prints and two were products, but, even so, it was nice to see them. I have continued to add more images to my Fine Art collection over there and now have almost 1500 images for sale. The images that sold as prints were:

As you can see, my enthusiasm for stock is going down, but is balanced by my energy in trying to get this prints to sell!

On the stock side, I did have a $60 net sale on Alamy for this foreclosure sign outside a townhouse. I did suggest to my premium members that eviction and foreclosure images would be worth creating and this is one where I followed my own advice:

It is a composite (which I am sure you can tell) using an old sign and a current photo of the front of my house. There were also a couple of $30 sales on Shutterstock, but nothing very exciting. Total video sales were $83 and that included a $47 license change on Pond5 on a previous purchase. So you can see how exciting the rest of the video sales were in May!

Well, what more can I say? Boring, indeed!