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...
I know this is quite early in the implementation of the changes, but after 3 full days of the new pricing when the reporting was being properly displayed, there is enough consistency in my subscription earnings to at least estimate its impact on me, as a Level 5 image contributor. I’ve focused on image earnings partly because I don’t really understand how I will see the changes on video payouts and also my video sales are pretty variable from month...
Well, Shutterstock started their new earnings schedule as promised on June 1st. Well, to be honest, they screwed that up and didn’t start until half way through that day and even then didn’t properly report the earnings in the correct areas of the earnings report on the site. And so on day 1, we had regular subscription sales for 38c (for me), the Single and Other earnings representing normal single sales plus a mix of 10c earnings. Later in the...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
