A new month, a new year and a new low in terms of earnings from stock photography in January. As the month went on, I knew this was not going to be great, as I just did not seem to break a steady but very slow daily pattern. Of course, the horrible reduction in Shutterstock earning percentage on January 1 did not help at all, although I managed to climb to Level 4 by January 20, which still meant I...
A second year without much travel! It’s great to be a travel stock photographer who doesn’t get to go anywhere new, although as I explained in a post last month, capturing images in your hometown might be worthwhile! But in this annual review of my efforts in stock photography, I’ll see if the lack of new imagery impacted my earnings. Spoiler alert – yes… You have seen this annual chart before, but this shows how 2021 dropped off from the...
Another year comes around! So, firstly, a Happy New Year to you all and let’s hope that 2022 shows us some light at the end of the tunnel. December did not look like a great earning month right from the start, with a very slow few days, and although it picked up a little, I still ended up with $2309, which as this graph shows, is the lowest for 5 years, but when I checked in my stats, it is...
My good friend Alex (and his anonymous partner) recently posted a statistical analysis of the most profitable locations (major cities) for stock photography, taking their earnings in that city and the cost of living into account. Their top 3 cities turned out to be Seville, Jerusalem and Rio de Janeiro. Here is their main table (although you should go and read the rest of the article!) That got me thinking. Are those the best places for travel stock photography or...
The November issue of my monthly reports on earnings from selling photos and videos online is out. OK, it is here, but that first sentence sounded more impressive! For quite some time I’ve been a bit displeased with the way the earnings were trending, but at last we have a break in the pattern with earnings of $2925. I’ll bump that up a little more as the story unfolds, but that is well above the $2425 I saw last month....
October is supposed to be the start of the winter higher sales period after the summer slump, but, for me at least, that didn’t happen this month! Last October was a career best with $3900! I didn’t expect that, but equally, I didn’t expect a career low for October of $2457. As this graph shows, this is far lower than any of the previous 5 years and is either showing that the industry is in a terminal decline, or my...
Another month and this time a real disappointment after two months where the Adobe Stock buyout offer resulted in some nice bumps to the income. Now we are seeing the new normal in the stock photography world and it really isn’t very pretty in my view. I still earned a pretty reasonable amount – $2502, but as the graph below shows, this is well below what I have seen in the same month for the past four years: As you...
Different sort of heading today in my usual monthly article about how much I earned from stock photography during the month of August 2021. The reason is that Adobe really helped me hit the ball out of the park with their two purchases of my images for their free collection during this month. The second one, on August 30th, was a real surprise, and together I earned $1100 from their $5 an image offer. Very nice! Overall, that made the...
Beginning of another month – these seem to come round so quickly! July 2021 was OK in terms of total earnings, but looking below the hood, things don’t look so good! Total income ended with $2933 which is in line with July earnings in the past couple of years. So no growth, but no decrease in that top line number. However, I “sold” 100 images to Adobe Stock for their free catalog and received $500 for those pretty low earning...
June is not normally one of my better months and this June was no change to that pattern! Actually, this June was my lowest earner in that month for the past 5 years, which is not a good start to this article! Still not bad at $2604 especially as I have been doing very little new stock work this year. Here is the normal graph with the historical story: Often people ask how many hours I put into stock photography...
