Category: Earnings

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,...

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).

Finally, a bit of good news. Shutterstock is still in the doldrums (with earnings this month of $877), but most of the other sites showed some positive improvements so that I ended the month with at least $2375. I say at least, because I noticed that on the first day of September I had a $50 sale in iStock’s partner program, which means that my normal estimates for iStock sales are probably low. What was good in September – 123RF...

August seems to have been the worst month for a long time for me. Shutterstock was a disaster – just $786 and that includes a $96 sale in the Single on demand area in the final week of the month. Without that, it would have been less that $700! Back in January and February, I was regularly hitting $1000+ – since April it has been downhill all the way. It just goes to show that diversification is important – if...

I was mulling over the strange click teasers (if that is an acceptable phrase..) that you see on the internet to try to entice you to click through to the article, and came up with one of my own. The answer, of course, is that I started selling them as stock photos, and creating a lot more as well, and I just noticed that I missed a major event – I passed the $100,000 earnings mark just a couple of...