Earnings from Adobe Stock and other agencies!
Different sort of heading today in my usual monthly article about how much I earned from stock photography during the month of August 2021. The reason is that Adobe really helped me hit the ball out of the park with their two purchases of my images for their free collection during this month. The second one, on August 30th, was a real surprise, and together I earned $1100 from their $5 an image offer. Very nice!
Overall, that made the month almost the best ever with a total of $3647 ($2547 without Adobe’s purchases) and the earnings history chart looks like this:
I’m always asked how many images I have in my portfolio – check last month’s article for the graph of files per agency, but the answer is around 16,000.
For a change this month, I’ll include the graph of earnings so far in 2021 from all the different agencies:
This is clearly showing just how much those “free image” purchases from Adobe are adding to the overall earnings – the three rounds so far have earned me $1600. What is noticeable in the graph is how there are a few “big” agencies but also how the smaller agencies may not add much individually, but over the course of the year it certainly adds up.
This month, Shutterstock would have been in first position with $690, helped by $254 of single sales that I will come back to. Adobe would have been $553, then iStock with a pretty low total (for me) of $381, then Canva with a respectable $134 followed by Alamy at $127 and so on down the list. EyeEM turned in a very good result with $107 helped by two sales for around $70 in total of my famous cat image! That single cat image has earned $4500 so far and, interestingly, I was approached by an ad agency interested in buying out the remaining life of the image. I quoted $5000 for that, but their client (a pet food company) eventually chose a different image and so I lost out on that one. The price didn’t seem to scare them, which is interesting in itself.
So what were the big earners in August? The big surprise for me was the sale of a pretty nondescript image of some carved arches in an old building in Bahrain:
In its full life, this image has earned $87 and $81 of that came from this sale on Shutterstock in August. Great result. It just goes to show how images can meet a need even though we might think they have little value. I also sold another good “Single” sale on SS with this one:
This one sold for $78 although its lifetime earnings are over $1500 now. I did a manual replacement of the sky (in the days before the automated sky replacement actions) and this has earned $450:
And a wider version of this (same proportions as the original) has earned $229. Not bad for a simple countryside panorama!
Then one of my cellphone tower images sold on SS for $37:
As I’ve mentioned before, this and its sky replacement brother have earned about $500 in the past 12 months or so. Not bad for a quick drone shot.
Coming down to more normal figures, I sold this round sheep for $28, again on SS:
Videos actually did pretty well in August. I haven’t shown the graph for a while, but we had a pick up in video sales to $150 this month:
The best seller was one on Adobe stock for $56. This was taken with a GoPro on a sucker mount in the front of a rental car on the Hawaiian island of Maui:
I also sold a $33 HD video of fireworks over Washington DC on Pond5 and another of my drone videos flying towards a power station on Shutterstock for $20.
So, overall, it is nice to see some videos being picked up again – I need to get out with my drone again, I can see!
As you also know, I have been trying to boost my sales of prints on Fine Art America and this month I actually sold 4 different products. Unfortunately, only one of them was a small print, the others being a puzzle, a towel and a bed cover, I think. So not great money, but I will write more about my experiences in using Social media to boost my sales in a separate article shortly. You can look back at my previous articles on using social media for photographers here.
That is all for now – time to get back to Pinterest!
Someone told me that iStock takes images off of social media web sites without paying for them because once posted they are free for the taking, and then sells them on iStock. Do you know if that is true?
I highly doubt it. Images on social media are not free to use, are usually small sizes and istock would be sued constantly if they did. Their customers would run for the hills! They did buy unsplash, a free to use stock site though, which is maybe where the story came from.
Great month Steve, congratulations. Never seizes to amaze me how you can pull it off during these challenging times. Great results!
Thanks Elijah!
I worry about the impact of selling those images to Adobe, on the other sites where I also have those images. But a nice addition to my pocket as well.
Hi Alessandra, The way I think about this is that we are just pawns in the huge game that is being played between the agencies. We can’t, individually, impact anything at all, and we can’t organize into a group that might influence things because we are too global and with few common objectives. So things are going to happen, such as free images at stock agencies, that we cannot in any way control. All we can do is decide what to do about it. Unless you have a really, really unique image, then someone is going to download an image at the site of their choice. If your image is so unique that they really must obtain that one and would seek it elsewhere, then there is no way you should nominate it for the free image collection. Then you aren’t losing that potential sale. So the ones going into the free collection are the ones that are more generic, where there is more competition, and where they haven’t earned much on that agency in the past. Getting $500 for 100 poor sellers on Adobe then sounds like a good deal to me. Yes, one of those might have earned more than $5, but the chance of all of them earning $500 in the year is pretty much zero. So, I’m currently in the “milk this while I can” phase of my stock career!
Steve
I understand it… and agree.
Nice month Steve.
Thanks!
Congrats Steven for a nice month! I just wandering if you were full time stock contributor 🙂 Greetings from Chile
Hi Oscar
No, I’ve always been part time. Many of my images are from vacations and trips, and I do the concept ones when I get the ideas.
Steve
Hi Steven, I just found your blog and it’s been super insightful into the game of stock photography. I have no clue about it and am very interested. What advice would you give a beginner? And what software do you use to track your sales on those graphs?
Hi Sonia – glad you have joined us. There is an awful lot of reading here! I just use Excel to track my earnings and I only update it monthly with the total sales from each agency. I do use Microstockr Pro, that does a great job of recording every sale from most of the important agencies and so I use that to come up with the sales over $10 and that sort of thing. On your question about advice for a beginner – I am giving a talk to a zoom meeting of the Shutterbug Excursions group. https://www.meetup.com/shutterbugexcursions/ Next week. You could listen in to that – there is no charge as far as I am aware