Category: Earnings

How much can you earn from selling your photos online in 2020

Making money from your images – May 2020

Another month, another dollar. I think the original was actually a dollar a day, which I guess could be the theme song for Shutterstock these days. But how did I do during another month of lockdown in selling my stock photos and videos. Overall, not too badly although there was the one big sale on Fine Art America for $130 that really made a difference to me this month. If only I could manage to get Fine Art sales every...

Thoughts on the new Shutterstock pricing model

Shutterstock shock treatment

I’m breaking the habit of a lifetime by posting some thoughts on the announcement that Shutterstock made today about their new earnings approach to be adopted in just 5 days time. I normally like to see how these changes are explained and then re-explained before commenting, but it is such a train crash of an announcement that I thought I should comment a little more quickly. First, let me say that in 40 years of senior positions in various companies...

How much can you earn from selling your photos

Selling Stock Photos in April 2020

A full month of sales during the Coronavirus lockdown! So how did I do? Surprisingly well! My earnings were pretty solid all through the month and I didn’t really see as much of a drop at weekends this month: The first week included Easter, which is obviously a holiday in many parts of the world and that was slow, but after that, things were good for the rest of the month. Overall earnings ended up being $2805. This month is...

Stock photo of new tax day of July 15, 2020

How much did I earn from stock photos – March 2020

Another month goes by and what a month to remember! Although I doubt if we will feel any better at all about April (and May…). However, on the stock photo front, things really picked up for me. I ended the month with $3141 which is the best result for quite a few months. For various reasons (mainly to do with having $600 in video sales), March 2019 was way better than this at $3675, but with all that is going...

Earnings from Stock Photography Feb 2020

A short but pretty depressing month from the point of view of earnings from stock photography in February 2020! Just $2275 for the month compared with $2993 in February 2019 and the lowest monthly total since July 2017. It is hard this month to find many bright spots among the agencies, but I’ll try! This is the overall picture of earnings over the past few years: I hope this is a one off poor month, but I don’t think I...

January 2020 Earnings from Stock Photography

At long last I can add a new post to this website! And the lucky post is my review of earnings in January. It turned out to be a reasonable month in the end – most of the month seemed to be slow and behind what I would have expected, but there was a burst of activity towards the end that helped my results. The month ended with earnings from photos and videos combined of $2889. Not too bad at...

Earnings from stock photography annual review for 2019

Year End Review – 2019

2019 has now come and gone and its time to review how the stock business performed during the year. Overall, it was not too bad (and could certainly have been worse) as I ended up with total earnings of $35,595 compared with $35,790 in 2018. I would really have liked to continue with some growth over previous years, but the slow second half of December put paid to that. Here is the trend: As you can see from the above,...

Earnings from selling photos online

Stock photo earnings December 2019

I’ve been anxiously awaiting my earnings from EyeEM after their extended holiday break before I report the full December earnings and now they are in! $22… Perhaps forget that now and come back to the main story. The month was pretty quiet in the second half, as usual, and I ended with $2630, about the same as last year. Quite a drop from previous months, but, as you can see from the graph, this is pretty normal. Just to add...

Adobe Illustrative Editorial Stock Images

Adobe have recently started accepting editorial images from contributors with more than 1000 lifetime downloads, but what does that mean? What is an illustrative editorial image? Firstly, what is an editorial image? It is an image that is intended to be used to illustrate or help explain an “educational” or news or commentary article rather than be used to promote a product or a point of view. To take an extreme for clarity – a picture of an Hispanic person...

Which stock agencies make the most money for photographers in 2019?

Review of Stock agency sales in November 2019

After I published yesterday’s post about earnings in November from stock photography, I realized that I hadn’t mentioned how the specific agencies had performed in the month. So this post fills that gap (and also reminds you that those sales on Edelkrone, Jixipix using code BLK40 and Luminar are still on today!) Shutterstock really performed well in the month with total earnings of $1101 of which $317 came from videos. I talked about some of the bigger photo sales yesterday...