Welcome to the April edition of “how much can you earn from stock photography”! As the title perhaps gives a clue, I’ll start with the headlines – not as much as previous months or years…. I ended the month with $2613 after a much healthier $3300 result in March. As the graph below shows, this was well below my April numbers for the past 3 years as well. Not good news, but, still, a tidy sum of money bearing in...
A new month and a new set of earnings. I have been doing this for so long, I could write these on autopilot! However, it looks as though this month is maintaining a more positive direction in terms of earnings with the total ending up (without EyeEM who are late for some reason) at a very pleasing $3274. Well up on January and February and about $110 up on earnings in March 2020. The full historic graph is here: I...
I’ve achieved something today that I should be proud of, but with all the unease about what Shutterstock are doing for contributors (or should I say doing to them), it all feels just a little jaded. But anyway, here is a snapshot of my contributor page on Shutterstock just now: I have a suspicion that the next $100,000 will take a much longer time that the first!
Always an interesting month – just 28 days, but it follows a usually slow start in January. This month followed that pattern with a growth from January, a growth over Feb 2020, but still a middle of the pack sort of performance. The final score was a total of $2812 for the month. This is all becoming very stable (which is good), but the growth of years gone by seems to have stopped. Not surprisingly, bearing in mind the pressure...
This month started very slowly and I thought this could be one of my worst months, but it ended with a bit of a bang and so crept into the middle of the road category of earnings! The bang was a sale of a 6 foot (almost 2m) wide print on wood of this panorama from Hanalei on the lovely island of Kauai: I received the email late on the 31 January and so it really made a difference to...
Time to look back at a very unusual year and not just in Stock Photography! It is fascinating to think about all the changes that we have lived through in just one year with some pretty major changes impacting us all in our profession (or hobby) of trying to make money from our photography. Of course the biggest change that impacted newer and smaller contributors significantly was the decision by Shutterstock, with little notice, to completely rework their contributor payout...
A month to end a year that we would all like to forget, I guess! And I will get back to the full year in my annual review of stock activity that I will write in a few days when the final results are in. But lets start with a world first (for me…). For the first time in my 14 years of writing about stock photography (and talking about it at this well reviewed introduction to stock photography video)...
After a focus this year on stock photos (with some great results), I decided to try to boost the sales of prints of what I call my Fine Art Collection! I mentioned that I was going to try an experiment of lowering my prices to see if that would juice the sales. Well, I gave it two months and nothing much happened, and so I reverted to a new pricing plan that was closer to the ones I have used...
Update: It appears that all may not have been as big an issue as I initially understood and may have just been with one contributor. However, I’ll be careful with my posts going forward, but perhaps not the issue I at first thought. I saw some posts recently that Shutterstock was issuing warnings to contributors who share their earnings, royalty amounts or other “confidential” information. This is forbidden in the terms and conditions we signed: By submitting any Content to...
What a business this is. Last month I had a record for earnings, this month I am over $1000 down from that total. Such is the stock photography business in 2020. The month started reasonably well with some biggish sales, but seemed to drop off a cliff after that first week. As a result, my earnings for the month turned out to be $2785. Of course, I know that is still a very solid month compared to earlier ones in...
