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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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!
Making money as a photographer must be one of the harder professions out there. Everyone seems to think that they can do it, and some people are willing to give excellent work away for free. You only need to look at Unsplash to see great images being offered with full commercial and editorial licenses at full resolution and for what? A credit line if you are lucky. As my friend Alex has discovered with his excellent research work on fraudulent...
I always like to see my images chosen to decorate someone’s wall and so I put what I think are my best artistic shots on Fine Art America and Photo4Me (for UK images mainly). This past month gave me just one sale of an image that has proved to be very popular: If you recall, I increased my pricing on FineArtAmerica a month or two back and this is the first sale under the new pricing scheme. Still too early...
The discussion about the graph I published yesterday about my return per image is interesting over on the Microstock Group. I thought it might be interesting to explain how I calculated this, what alternatives there are and to show one area of good news! So what is Return per online image? Simply put, it is the earnings you get from an agency divided by the number of files you have. The interesting question is how do you count those files?...
