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...
What a month! After a couple of barren months, July roared back to give me both a best month ever and also I finally broke the magical $1000 earning level. As an earlier post detailed, I had a number of great sales – $118 on Alamy and $100 on Dreamstime, a couple of video sales for $25 each, and a few Shutterstock enhanced licenses for $28 each. A surprising entry in the list was iSignStock – a UK based stock...
After a couple of poor months, July has been unusual, to say the least. The month started well with the purchase of the full rights to an image on Dreamstime, followed by a couple of enhanced sales on the following two days on Shutterstock – one of our bengal cat with a mournful expression and one of the city of Abu Dhabi. In the meantime, Pond5 came in with two sales from Kauai – one of the pier at Hanalei...
Well, time to dust off the camera and get shooting again! June was not a good month for sales with the total not even hitting the $600 mark, ending at $595. The reasons were pretty clear as I looked at the various sites. Although the number of downloads was pretty similar from month to month, there was a distinct lack of any enhanced or higher value sales. In previous months, I was seeing several $28 sales on Shutterstock and occasional...
