In my post yesterday, I worried about the drop in earnings (in total and per online image) on Shutterstock, and as their financial results came out today, I did a bit of a calculation to help explain what is happening.
Firstly – what a poor month! I just scraped past the $2000 mark, thanks to Canva ($247) and Fotolia ($274). Alamy and Corbis were OK with $197, iStock at $248 and 123RF came in nicely at $154. But Shutterstock really slumped down to $536. I think I need to go back to 2012 before I find a month as bad as that. That make me think about my graphs of earnings per online image to see how things are looking...
I’ll start with a post about the good news this month – a sale on Fine Art America for a shower curtain (!). My profit on this was only $5, but it is nice to think about the buyer stepping naked past my image (OK, I’ll stop that…) This was the image:
Another month, another disappointment with Shutterstock! After it picked up to $920 in May, we are back down at $748 for June. The lack of on-demand and the more expensive Extended and Single sales really is making a difference and it isn’t the reliable earner it once was, unfortunately. Lets hope they have some plans to pull up the earnings (unless the plan is to accept so many images that each contributor gets a smaller share of the pie) However,...
Although these don’t come round very often, I did get a sale in May on Fine Art America. The one that sold was a 14 x 12 inch canvas of a traditional Washington DC view – the moon rising over the city. This one earned $27 profit with my current pricing scheme on FAA. Each time I get a sale I think that I must add some more images there, but rarely do. I just accept the sales that...
Another month goes by so quickly. It has been a strange month here in the wilds of West Virginia – very cold early on, and then pretty hot for the last week. With moving into a new house we are still snowed under in boxes and lots to be done around the house and so almost no photography to speak of for at least 2 months now. I’ve not uploaded very much either as a result, so it is interesting...
First a word about February – although this is a short month, it didn’t turn out too badly for me, my Stock Photographer’s Lament notwithstanding! Total earnings ended at $2511 and some of the Zoonar and iStock earnings have still to appear. Bright points of the month were with iStock, where I had five Extended licenses bought on the same day – all variants of this shoot: Fotolia/Adobe is continuing to grow – I reached $192 from that site in February,...
As I jokingly suggested in this post about a stock photographer’s year, January is never a great month for earnings and it didn’t let me down. It wasn’t too bad, to be honest, with the earnings ending at $2213, but compared to last January which had $2314, I am hardly making progress. And I uploaded about 1200 images in the past year as well. So it looks like the general rule is becoming that you need to continue working hard...
Another year ends, and time to review where I am against my plans to continue to grow my stock photo business. Well, the results are in and it turned out to be an OK year – solid, but no growth over 2014 even though I continued to add images to my portfolio: What this is showing is that
Good months and bad… After a pretty good October when my total earnings reached $2639, November dropped, although at least I stayed above that $2000 threshold – ending the month with $2145. Here is my overall earning chart – getting a little difficult to see now with so many months, so when I get to January I’ll rework it to show fewer years. What do I see as the trends (as far as my sort of stock photos are concerned).
