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...
A great month – April doesn’t normally outsell other months of the year, but this month I romped home with total sales of just over $1450 – a personal best. The month was helped by three sales on Alamy, for a total of $214, three video downloads on Pond5 for $75 and another great month on Shutterstock of $513. iStock recovered from a poor March to end with $271 compared to $235, and the other sites were OK if not...
I am very late uploading my usual graphs of earnings for March – I went off to England at the end of March and am only just back (with some more images to process and upload). March was a pretty good month – not my best, but only $15 below that peak. Shutterstock hit a new record of $508, and some of the other sites were fantastic – 123RF with $115 compared to a previous best of $67, and Fotolia...
February started really well on Shutterstock with three enhanced license downloads in the first 3 days of the month, but then it slowed up… Overall, though, the month was pretty much on par with recent months with total earnings of $1120. I worked hard in the early part of the month to get as many of my Hawaii/Kauai images online, and also took a series of macro and still life images as the month went by. That resulted in a...
A new year starts in a pretty reasonable fashion with total earnings of around $1150. It isn’t just good enough to keep me on track for my 2012 target of $18000, but there are still plenty of months and plenty of images to upload between now and the end of the year! I added around 100 images this month to most of the stock agencies, although I am still going through the hundreds of photos taken on my recent trip...
