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?...
2018 is behind us and thank goodness December has gone! This was one of the worst months for sales for a couple of years and I ended up with $850 less than in December 2017. Total earnings for December 2018 turned out to be $2350. A bit disappointing after all the effort in getting new images and videos online. Still, it is what it is and I need to look forward now to a great January! As this is also...
All good records must come to an end! For the first time in 18 months, the earnings in November were less than those in the same month the previous year! Not bad, just not good enough! Overall, I earned $3073 from photos and videos – but less than the $3177 in November 2017. So at least the pressure is off in future months! This is what the picture looks like: Well above previous Novembers but I was really on a...
I always like to see sales on the Print on Demand sites as it gives me a nice warm feeling that my “art” is appreciated! The money helps as well! So the past couple of weeks have been excellent in terms of new sales on Fine Art America – perhaps the biggest of the sites. The first sale was in late October and was for a 14 x 11 inch print of Cheat Lake in the fall in Morgantown: As...
Another month, another record! October earnings of $3248 marked the 17th consecutive month when my earnings from selling photos and videos online have beaten the same month in the previous year. This is going to be a slightly shorter post than normal as I have just got back from 3 weeks in China and have 4200 photos and 90 videos to process. I can see that this could take the whole of the month to work through and I need...
The September results are in and the big question is whether I managed to maintain my record of beating the earnings in the same month in the previous year? The answer is yes – for the 16th consecutive month I have increased earnings over that same month. I’m not sure how long I can keep this up, but it is a worthwhile goal! To be honest, there is not much that you can do to impact sales in any particular...
Another day another dollar as an old American song goes! August may be a slow time of the year with vacations and holidays, but the stock world keeps on turning. I’m going to split the post this month and talk about earnings today and then come back on some of the notable sales – ie those images that earned more than $10, of which there were 14 in the month. As it turned out, August continued my record breaking run...
