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...
I’ve just published my December stock photo earnings results, and thought it would be helpful to review the year – how I did, what changed, lessons learned and thoughts for 2012. First, a graph of earnings per site through 2011: The December results showed the growth in earnings, but in a nutshell, I went from total earnings in Dec 2010 of $429 to $1188 in Dec 2011. Month to month growth over the year of 176%! What did I do...
The December results are pretty good, and also quite consistent from month to month. Although December obviously has two major holidays, and work tends to slow down in many offices, the final sales of $1188 are better than I expected. Shutterstock came in really well with a couple of Enhanced Licenses on Friday (of the coastline of St John), to give total earnings of $507 for the month – a record for that site. The previous high had been $451...
I’ve been doing some analysis of my portfolio to try to work out if the earnings have risen because of the number of images online, or if other factors are coming into play. The answers are fascinating! Although there is a lot of doom and gloom in the stock industry, with the common view that earnings are falling faster than you can put images online, the key point from my analysis is that the earnings per image is actually increasing...
Another pretty good month – even though the Thanksgiving holiday in the US depressed sales in the final week (especially on iStock). Overall sales again beat the $1000 barrier to come in at $1068. Not as good as last month’s $1300, but there were not at many big ticket sales. Veer was $31 instead of $135, Alamy $30 rather than $85 and CanStock slumped from $72 to a measly $11. Isignstock maintained its good record – down a bit from...
Another great month! I have now easily beaten the $1200 barrier and ended the month with sales of $1262.67, beating last months record by a cool $200. Most of the sites did well, with Shutterstock setting its own record with $451 and iStock maintaining a steady performance of over $200 in the past 3 months. Back in May, I was averaging $100 on that site, which shows what the Photo+ program has done (coupled with steady uploading each month.) I...
The summer lull has definitely passed, and September turned in the best month to date in terms of earnings. Shutterstock roared ahead with a personal best on that site of $415, beating a previous high of $386 set back in April. The sales of the cat images as enhanced downloads certainly helped – all told I had four enhanced downloads from that site. iStock has also turned into a nice little earner. I have tried to upload 20 images every...
The August results are now complete, and this has been a pretty reasonable month. August is never a great month because of vacations in many parts of the world, but this has been a month marked by steady progress on most of the sites. There were no one-off specials like the rights sale for $100 on Dreamstime and the $120 Alamy sale last month, but overall each agency played its part in getting to a total of $892. Shutterstock broke...
