Backyard Silver - a personal and detailed guide to how to make money from selling your photos and videos online

Category: Earnings

Earnings / Stock Photography

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?

Earnings

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...

Earnings from stock photos reaches a new record

Earnings / Stock Photography

Making money as a stock photographer Nov 2019

Yesterday I published my video earnings for November 2019, but what was the rest of the story? As I expected, yesterday was a very slow day (which makes 3 in a row as Thanksgiving in the US makes a big dent in my sales). However, the month as a whole was great – I ended up with $3418. I have to recognize that there were a few one-offs this month. A sale on Fine Art America earlier in the month...

Earnings from video stock assets in November 2019

Earnings

Video stock sales in November 2019

A change this month – as I am very unlikely to get any new video sales today I decided to write about my experiences in selling video clips as stock in November and how I have seen the trend over the years. First off – November was actually pretty good – not the best month ever, but at $487, it is not bad at all! As you can see, I have had 3 superb months in the past, but this...

What sells best - travel or studio stock photography?

Earnings

What sells best – Travel or Studio stock?

I was asked, in a comment on my October earnings, what percentage of my sales came from travel stock photos rather than studio images. I’ve often wondered that, but it is quite hard to estimate now that I have so many images for sale (over 14,000). But it is an intriguing question, all the same. I struggled a bit with definitions – is an image of a previous house I lived in a studio shot or a travel shot? As...

earnings from selling digital photos online in October 2019

Earnings

Making money from stock photos – October 2019

Another month rolls by and another report on earnings! As it turned out, October was a pretty good month for me – not as good as 2018, but still above the lows of the summer. Total income turned out to be $3074 with all agencies reporting (although Canva has not yet reported the subscription income as yet). The addition of those subscription earnings made quite a bit of difference to the previous earnings I reported for Canva (assuming their reports...

Earnings / Stock Photo Examples

What stock photos and videos sold in September?

I published my normal report in two bites this month to avoid giving you all indigestion. Earlier this week I published the financial results, this post has more of the “why” rather than the “what”. First thing to note for me is that I had some days with some great sales. Here is my snapshot of daily earnings from Microstockr Pro. This doesn’t track every agency (and iStock, which is tracked, has the results for the month previous so I...

Earnings

Making money from stock photography – Aug 19

Another month in the doldrums of summer with earnings to match! Everyone must have been on vacation this past month as my total earnings just managed to creep up to $2424. Although I expect a drop in the summer, this was well below 2018 and 2017 for the same month. To be fair, though, it would be hard to get another massive sale on Society6 similar to the one last month. Incidentally, that big sale cleared without any issues and...

Half dollar coin isolated against white

Earnings / Stock Photography

Selling stock photos – July 2019

A very nice month for earnings. Of course, one of the big reasons was that amazing sale on Society6 which resulted in $333 being added to my earnings balance in July, but the other sites were pretty reasonable as well. Traditionally, July is a pretty slow month for me – my previous highwater mark was $2500 reached in July 2018. Previous years had been in the $2250 range. So July 2019 came in with a very strong $2866. This graph...