Although March is supposed to be one of the best months of the year for the sale of stock photos, this month was good, but not great for me. I have continuing worries about the volatility of Shutterstock earnings – and I’ll do a separate post on that shortly – but the month ended up with a total of $1980. Definitely good, but with all the efforts at unloading images in late Feb/early March, I was hoping for a little...
Not a great month! Sometimes this business can really knock you back, but I think the message is to just ignore the fall and get back on the bicycle! I did spend some time wondering if the work of uploading was worth the hassle, but am now back keywording and processing as before. So, what happened? Shutterstock was extremely slow in February – especially later in the month. I particularly noticed an almost complete lack of the Single downloads that...
The latest set of earnings from selling digital images shows a return to form! December was a little bit of a disappointment (although it is a month with a lot of holidays) and I ended that month with earnings of $1735. January started slow, but it picked up as the month progressed to give me a total of $2180 – not a best ever, but pretty close. As usual, Shutterstock was in the lead, followed by iStock, and then 123RF...
The end of December is a time for reflection and setting of new targets for the coming year and so I decided to pull out all the stops and do a detailed analysis of how my efforts in the Stock Photography business are going. This is going to be a long posting, so relax and take the information in stages! First, how did December pan out. Not great (although in perspective for the whole of 2012, it was a reasonable...
November is usually a pretty good month, but this year, it turned out to be a great one. I was excited in October to finally break through the $2000 barrier and now in November I easily exceeded that to end the month with $2216 in earnings – more than 10% more. My growth chart is looking pretty good at the moment: The great earners this month were Shutterstock (of course) with a BME of $970 – around $150 more than...
A common fear among stock photographers is that it is a “losing” battle – you need to keep uploading images just to keep your earnings where they are. I decided to update an analysis I did a year or so back to see if my uploads to Shutterstock (and to the other sites) were increasing my earnings. First, the methodology. Each month I make a note of the earnings from each site and for most of them, I also note...
It has been a long time since I posted on the site – sorry about that! Just been very busy with travel and some personal issues, but I am back now, and back with a roar! October turned out to be a great month for sales. The combination of the end of the summer vacations, start of planning for Christmas and early new year publications for designers, and perhaps the cumulative effect of adding more images on all of the...
Back on the normal cycle of publishing my earnings at the start of each month! September and October tend to be two of the best months of the year, and my September isn’t quite there, but is quite an improvement from August, which had plummeted down to $1425. September has come in at a much more healthy $1632, which is not my best month ever, but is nicely positioned at number 2. It will be a while before I reach...
This is a very late post, and I can understand if you think I was trying to hide bad news – but no, I had a death in the family and so my attention was elsewhere. However, earnings in August were not good! After a series of great months, with earnings reaching $1761 in June, I fell back to only $1415 in August. Several reasons seem to be behind this – one might be the holidays when buyers are at...
Selling photos is certainly getting interesting with another great month in May, easily exceeding my best month to date in April 2012. This month I ended with $1608, after the adjusted earnings for April of $1537. I adjusted April as I later found a reasonable sale on Alamy late on the evening of 30 April and, strangely enough, the same thing happened this month – a $108 sale for a book illustration on the 31st May. That made six sales...
