Category: Earnings

Notebook recently sold on Society6 with a cover using my image of Washington DC with a harvest moon

Society6 sales go through the roof

I checked my Society6 earnings page last week and was shocked to see a new total of $333.40 in pending earnings!! Last month it was $16.60! So what is happening over there? Sales so far in the month have been: Profit on that sale – $18.00. Then I had two sales of my Chicago city skyline. One on an X-large art print with a profit of $28 and on an small wall tapestry with a profit of $4.50. The next...

quarterly earnings from stock photography

Selling Photos – Quarter 2, 2019

After my June report on earnings from Stock Photography was published earlier this week, I worked on my massive spreadsheet to calculate the quarterly results and smooth out some of the monthly variants. The end result isn’t too pleasing, to be honest! The total, $8524 is the lowest since the third quarter of 2017 when I earned $7818. Of course, one quarter may be a blip, but the evidence points to a continued decline in earnings per online file, which...

Can you make money from selling your photos?

Earnings from selling photos online June 2019

Another month zooms by (and this was a busy month for my uploads) but there is unfortunately little sign that the industry is improving. In fact, some agencies just collapsed during the month – Canva was earning $200 – $250 a month last year, in June 2019 I earned the tidy sum of $25.90. As you probably know, Canva acquired Pexels and Pixabay, two “free download” image sites and has presumably integrated that supply into their service. As a result,...

Earnings from stock photography in May 2019

Earnings from photography May 2019

Another month passes by and this one was a bit “blah…” For some reason, the last week of the month (ignoring Memorial Day in the USA) was very slow, which hit the earnings overall and so I ended up with a total of $2755 for the month. By the way, it was very nice to see that Alex, over on the Brutally Honest website, managed to beat the $1000 threshold this month – well done, Alex! As you can see,...

Making money from your photos – April 2019

Somewhat delayed, my earnings report for April! But first, a shout out to my good friend Alex, who has been regularly publishing interesting and insightful blog posts at his Brutally Honest Guide to Microstock, and now publishes his earnings each month. Alex has different approaches to me – in particular he is separating out his best images for Robert Harding as exclusive RM as well as uploading specific ones for book covers at Archangel. Interesting to watch how his earnings...

Society6 keeps on rolling

Another month with more sales on Society6! This time, a collection of different products rather than just some wall art (although it is nice to see those sales!). The first sale was actually just that – an art print of the Cherry Blossoms in Washington DC: This one made a profit of $22. Quite a lot less than at FineArtAmerica, but you need to price to match the competition at the place the buyer is searching. I did publish my...

Best selling assets in March

Following on from my previous post about total earnings from stock photography in March, this is the next layer of detail of what worked, and what didn’t. I’ll talk about video first – as I mentioned, this was a great month for video with total sales over $500. In fact, it was actually better than that! Due to the way iStock reports earnings, I always include the money I get from them in the month as the earnings for that...

Summary of earnings for March 2019

April 1 Report on Earnings from Stock Photos

What a month – $9,650 earned from the sale of stock photos and videos in March 2019! OK – I did give the game away in the title this month…this bit was an April Fools joke (sort of…) Back to earth with a bang, although not that much of one. March did turn out to be a great month for me in both photos and videos with a total of $3663. Easily my best month ever and beating April 2018...

Making money from stock photography and selling your photos online

Making money from stock photos – Feb 2019

Another month zooms by, and time for the February earnings details. February has always been a pretty consistent month for me and this year is no exception. That sounds good, but of course I have many more images and videos online each year and the ideal performance would be a steady increase. But these days, we take what we can get from stock photography! Total earnings were down a bit from the previous two years, but not by much, and...

100000 downloads of images and videos on shutterstock microstock agency

Major Threshold Passed

I first started uploading to Shutterstock in early 2008 and this weekend I passed a big milestone: Things have not always been a smooth on Shutterstock with some down years, but adding video to my portfolio has certainly helped maintain some consistency on downloads. Perhaps I will hit the 200,000 download threshold in less than 10 years from now!