Category: Stock Photography
For a while I started identifying the images that were downloaded under the $28 enhanced license on Shutterstock, but back in June, those downloads almost dried up, and I stopped publishing them! I’m sure the two things are not related, but it didn’t seem worthwhile publishing a couple of images a month. I’ve started getting a few more in recent months, but one great surprise this month was a $70 download under the Single Download category on Shutterstock. Perhaps this...
A common fear among stock photographers is that it is a “losing” battle – you need to keep uploading images just to keep your earnings where they are. I decided to update an analysis I did a year or so back to see if my uploads to Shutterstock (and to the other sites) were increasing my earnings. First, the methodology. Each month I make a note of the earnings from each site and for most of them, I also note...
Everyone is probably familiar with green screen technology – look at some of the fantastic movies and even the weatherman to see green screening (or chroma key) in operation. Stock photographers can use it to extract an object from a background by taking the image against a green cloth and then getting rid of the “green.” Why not just take the image against a white background that is bright enough to burn out to pure white? Well, it is hard...
It has been a long time since I posted on the site – sorry about that! Just been very busy with travel and some personal issues, but I am back now, and back with a roar! October turned out to be a great month for sales. The combination of the end of the summer vacations, start of planning for Christmas and early new year publications for designers, and perhaps the cumulative effect of adding more images on all of the...
Back on the normal cycle of publishing my earnings at the start of each month! September and October tend to be two of the best months of the year, and my September isn’t quite there, but is quite an improvement from August, which had plummeted down to $1425. September has come in at a much more healthy $1632, which is not my best month ever, but is nicely positioned at number 2. It will be a while before I reach...
This is a very late post, and I can understand if you think I was trying to hide bad news – but no, I had a death in the family and so my attention was elsewhere. However, earnings in August were not good! After a series of great months, with earnings reaching $1761 in June, I fell back to only $1415 in August. Several reasons seem to be behind this – one might be the holidays when buyers are at...
One of the smaller line items (but still significant!) in my monthly sales tables is Pond5. This site is one of the leading agencies in stock footage – and since I uploaded my first movies in 2010, I have earned over $850 from the licensing of short video clips. The sales are a bit intermittent, but each one nets around $30 (they sell for $50 to $60), and so a sale makes quite a difference to my monthly earnings. I...
I cover both of these sites in detail in my eBook, but a couple of updates that will be useful if you are uploading to these sites. Fotolia: When I upload to Fotolia, I now click on the “State” heading in “Manage Files” before starting to edit the uploaded images prior to submission. This keeps all the unsubmitted files on the first page of images, and stops you having to keep jumping to later pages if you have uploaded a...
Well, the run of record earnings had to end sometime, and July was the month! The almost zero count of Enhanced Licenses on Shutterstock (only one EL download on 31 July this month), and a much less dramatic performance on Alamy ($98 compared to $248) meant that this was not going to be a record month, but it was still reasonable for a middle of the summer holidays season. Shutterstock actually did OK with $572, and iStock was great with...
The title of this post sounds like a song (although I think that was “flowers..”), but this month has seen a serious drop in the number of enhanced license downloads from Shutterstock for me as well as a number of forum members at the Microstock Group. I normally see four to six EDs from Shutterstock in a month (each earning me $28) and in July this has dropped to just one (and that came on the last day of the...
