I’ve been taking a break from stock for a few days to get ready for Christmas, although I did take the opportunity to photograph my grandchildren in front of the Xmas tree. I rarely use them as models for stock photos – there are possibly too many ways that images can be misused, but certain shots are less likely to be taken out of context and so I do upload those with a model release. This one really caught my...
There were multiple questions about keywords in my recent post asking for questions for me to mull over. I’ve thought about how best to do this – copy the questions into this post, or just try to answer as many as I can and you can trust me that I took your questions into account! I think the latter is the best approach, but let me know if you disagree. To complete the circle, I’ll reply to each of the...
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...
It is the dream of every stock photographer – host your own images on your own site, set the prices you want for the licenses and cut out the ridiculous percentage that agencies take out of the payment. What could possibly go wrong? Unfortunately, quite a lot! This post is a run through of the history, and the results, of my own efforts in this space. And, of course, my conclusions! I started this venture way, way back in 2013...
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...
EyeEM is an interesting site for photographers with some real negatives, but some positive signs on the earnings. I have been with them since early 2018 and I think I saw my first earnings in April of that year. In 2018 I earned $407 and 2019 so far has been $767 for the month through June. So it has become a steady middle of the road earner – certainly beating many established sites with a much larger portfolio. So that...
After my June report on earnings from Stock Photography was published earlier this week, I worked on my massive spreadsheet to calculate the quarterly results and smooth out some of the monthly variants. The end result isn’t too pleasing, to be honest! The total, $8524 is the lowest since the third quarter of 2017 when I earned $7818. Of course, one quarter may be a blip, but the evidence points to a continued decline in earnings per online file, which...
Another month zooms by (and this was a busy month for my uploads) but there is unfortunately little sign that the industry is improving. In fact, some agencies just collapsed during the month – Canva was earning $200 – $250 a month last year, in June 2019 I earned the tidy sum of $25.90. As you probably know, Canva acquired Pexels and Pixabay, two “free download” image sites and has presumably integrated that supply into their service. As a result,...
I went on a cruise in May between Athens and Venice and over the 14 days we were away, took a total of 3300 images and 26 videos. Ever since I have been working on editing and then keywording/uploading the images (still got to work on the videos…). What surprised me, and hopefully this is a good sign that my skills are improving, is that although the 3300 images included the individual frames of stitched panoramas, and also the multiple...
Sorry for the lack of new posts – I’ve been travelling and have just got back with 3500+ images to handle. Just before I departed, I wrote a new blog post on Dreamstime entitled “Taking Nature Photos that sell!” If you have a Dreamstime account, you will be able to vote if you find it useful. Incidentally, thanks to all who voted for my previous blog entry to their contest about shooting fireworks at events. That contest was pretty strange...
