December 2024 – Stock photo earnings report
Another year goes by and another report of mine is late! My excuse – totaling these large numbers takes time! And one more diversion before we get into the meat of the report. Alex from Brutally Honest Stock has written a novel for his December/end of 2024 report. Definitely worth reading and an excellent summary of the state of the industry.
December turned out to be pretty successful overall, but not because of stock earnings. I could see from Microstockr that this was not going to be great and the last 2 weeks were particularly slow. Not necessarily surprising given the holidays, but it felt slower than normal. And, of course, I could look forward to an even slower start to January as the special encouragement approach of Shutterstock (the reduction of everyone to minimum commissions) kicked in. Perhaps Getty will scrap this (or extend it to all their offerings??)
So, total earnings came in at $3568. Stock sales (using my amortization schedule for one-off payments) came in at $2047 and fine art print sales at $1665. My usual historic chart:
As you can see, December is normally a low month, but 2024 blew that out of the park. I normally show my file count here, but it hasn’t changed much and so look back at last months report for that.
I have already written at length about my earnings from selling fine art prints in December 2024 in this report, but here is the updated chart that shows stock and fine art earnings during the past few years.
And, because this is the end of 2024, here is something similar showing how stock photo earnings have peaked and dropped away over the years and my efforts on selling prints of my best work has picked up the slack. The totals have been around $35 – $36K reliably since 2018.
If I can maintain a similar growth in the fine art sales in 2025 and beyond, I will be a happy camper! Disappointing to see the stock sales chart though – we all knew this was happening, but here is a clear decline since mine peaked in the Covid days (due to me catching that photo subject trend early).
And, while we are on graphs, here is the one that shows stock photo earnings (with the one-off payment peaks smoothed out) and sorted by month.
If you look at the purple column, you can see this year has been below the levels of the previous 3 years almost every month and the December results maintained that drop, perhaps even more precipitously. Not a great sign for the future, I’m afraid, although I must admit that focusing on selling prints has meant that I have not really created any new “concept” stock photos in quite some time. I have uploaded travel ones, but even that was much reduced in 2024. So perhaps I am to blame for some of this decline in 2024.
Stock Agency Earnings Performance
As always, Adobe Stock was the best performing agency with $558, but this was well below the most recent months. SS dropped into third position as usual with $281 even though iStock declined as well to $356. Then came Alamy at $226, and then we are down in the weeds.
High earners in December 2024
Not surprisingly, there were not many high earners in December! I had four sales of $13 on Dreamstime, which I usually assume are because someone bought a “print” license. It would have been nice if they had bought a print, but that is a risk I’m willing to take at present. People can always print from a stock photo regardless of the license they buy, so I should be happy that they paid $13!
My highest paying image was actually on Shutterstock and was this one of the US capitol with a sunset behind the dome:
$43.75 earned. I’m pleased that they didn’t wait until January to license it – I would have got about $10 with the reduced commissions!
That is about all I have time for – I need to get my main PC upgraded to Windows 11 and then get back to uploading more images to boost my earnings in 2025. Good luck to you all!
