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...
A good month or what? I’ll answer that question right away – a great month. If the stars have ever aligned over my portfolio, it was this month as multiple things seem to have gone well, and I ended the month with a career best of $3813! As you can see, well above anything else this year and certainly a big step change over the same month in previous years. So what went well? Right from the beginning of the...
There is something very satisfying about selling a photo as a large art print and I have had some great high priced sales on Fine Art America in the past. My latest one, of course, netting $287. But I was looking at similar images of this same place on FAA, and noticed that other artists were reporting more sales than I was seeing (you can tell by looking at the comments as you almost always get a comment when you...
Once again, a very reasonable month. I know that we are probably in the final stages of this industry in terms of whether a single contributor (as opposed to a group of artists continually uploading new content) can make a reasonable living from stock, but usually the death of an industry takes longer than you think! In this case I think the major impact on earnings is the pressure that is on the stock agencies to get buyers to pay...
A slow month all round – slow in earnings, and definitely very slow in terms of the effort I put into stock this month! I did have a side line in photographing images for a friend of mine who sells LED lightbulbs on Amazon and he wanted to improve his store – so we did a deal where I would create new images for his store and upload them. If you are in the UK and need an LED lightbulb,...
It is always interesting to see how my earnings compare month by month and also with the same month in the previous years and this month was no exception. I didn’t expect to get anything like the June results, because I had some great one-off events that month that I didn’t expect to be repeated, but even so, July came in pretty solidly with $2895. That compares with the $3245 in June and $2950 in July 2019, pre-Covid! As I...
Each quarter I do a slightly deeper analysis of my earnings from selling stock photos and videos online and so the quarter 2 results are in. Overall, the quarter from March to June 2020 was not too bad – ending with $8966 of which $755 came from video sales. Q1 of 2020 was slightly lower at $8458. The historical picture is here: What is interesting about this graph is how the last 3 years have been “reasonably” stable. The end...
A great month for me, thanks to a number of factors that all came together in this one month. Of course, the issues with Shutterstock clouded the month and it would have been even better if I hadn’t suspended my account, but the final earnings count of $3235 exceeded all my expectations. Here is my normal graph: As you can see, June 2020 is towering over the previous earnings for that month in earlier years, although I would be foolish...
The change in contributor earnings announced just 6 days ahead of the operative date of June 1, 2020, has set the world of the contributors alight. Currently there are almost 6000 posts on the forum on this topic alone (and some have been deleted by the administrators), Facebook groups have been formed to organize action and there is a plan to have D-day on June 15th where contributors around the world will deactivate their Shutterstock portfolios. Why all this angst?...
In these troubled times, it is important to perhaps take a break from feeding the stock machine and see if you can process some of your better images for sale as prints or on other products. I upload my best shots to Fine Art America (always), Photo4Me (sometimes) and Society6 (from time to time). I was reminded of this with another sale earlier this month on Fine Art America – this time a large metal print (36 inches x 24...
