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...
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...
