September is usually a good time of the year for stock earnings. For me, this month, not so much! I must have really hit a bad patch as I ended the month probably just scraping to the $2000 mark. I’m sure many readers would love to get to that point, but I’m only reporting on my experiences with my portfolio. I don’t have my Alamy/Corbis/Getty earnings yet as I submitted to those via a partner, but without those I ended...
Update: See the final paragraph as I discovered a flaw in this approach! As readers of my book know, I have been recommending StockUploader for some time as an easy way to upload your files to many different stock agencies in parallel. Unfortunately the developer stopped supporting the software due to other priorities but he continued to provide a working copy for anyone who had bought my eBook. However, even that arrangement has come to an end and so I...
In my book, I talk at length about using DeepMeta as a way to ease the pains of submission to iStockphoto. iStock has two annoying steps in submission – one is to select a category (which isn’t that hard, although there are a lot of them), but the key annoyance is the matching of your keywords to their controlled vocabulary. They have a unique system of doing their image searches on a standardized set of keywords and so you need...
It is hard to work up the enthusiasm for posting this, but another poor month for me. Shutterstock continued in the doldrums with hardly any single or enhanced sales and total earnings of $610. To think I used to regularly get over $1000 from that site! iStock was poor with an estimated $200 and Alamy/Corbis was not great with $100 – not helped by the closure of Corbis to new sales.
In my post yesterday, I worried about the drop in earnings (in total and per online image) on Shutterstock, and as their financial results came out today, I did a bit of a calculation to help explain what is happening.
Firstly – what a poor month! I just scraped past the $2000 mark, thanks to Canva ($247) and Fotolia ($274). Alamy and Corbis were OK with $197, iStock at $248 and 123RF came in nicely at $154. But Shutterstock really slumped down to $536. I think I need to go back to 2012 before I find a month as bad as that. That make me think about my graphs of earnings per online image to see how things are looking...
I’ll start with a post about the good news this month – a sale on Fine Art America for a shower curtain (!). My profit on this was only $5, but it is nice to think about the buyer stepping naked past my image (OK, I’ll stop that…) This was the image:
These things only come round every month or two, but this one was worth mentioning – a sale of a 30 x 18 inch metal print of the Wailua Waterfall in Kauai – sold to someone who lives very close to the falls, so I guess they must think it is a good likeness! The profit on this one with my FAA pricing plan
Another month, another disappointment with Shutterstock! After it picked up to $920 in May, we are back down at $748 for June. The lack of on-demand and the more expensive Extended and Single sales really is making a difference and it isn’t the reliable earner it once was, unfortunately. Lets hope they have some plans to pull up the earnings (unless the plan is to accept so many images that each contributor gets a smaller share of the pie) However,...
We found our way to a very remote spot in West Virginia today – Jenkinsburg Bridge, also known as Bull Run Bridge over the Cheat River. This 1912 metal truss bridge is only about 12 miles as the crow flies from Morgantown, but the only road to it takes almost 50 minutes and the last 4 miles is on a 4 wheel drive very rough and steep track down the hillside. The road across the bridge is pretty much impassable...
