Earnings from Photography in April 2023

Monthly Earnings from Photography

Another month swings by and another earnings report. Last year in April 2022, I had a spectacular result of Fine Art Sales on my new gallery at Pictorem. This month, not so good! Overall, I ended the month with $2653, compared to $3450 in the same month last year and $2862 in March 2023. As you will see below, the Wall Art stuff really let me down with total sales of just $65 this month. I have been busy on processing and keywording (as you will see below) and so social media activities have taken a back seat – I hope I can turn that round in the next few months.

The top agency, once again, is Adobe Stock. Although not meeting last month’s performance, it ended up with a nice $745 with SS in second place with $556. I had some good higher priced sales on Shutterstock which helped this month. iStock was third, as usual, with $385. Not great, and when I look at the individual sales, there is not one above $10, which certainly makes the difference between a good and a poor month there. I haven’t uploaded to iStock for a long time now, mainly due to the complexity of their vocabulary, and perhaps I will dedicate a few hours to trying to get some of my more recent images online there.

Canva was pretty reasonable with $212 and Pond5 came in nicely with $177 due to the payment for the use of their library for AI training (more below on that) and Alamy rounds out the over $100 sites with $137.

Here are my usual graphs of earnings and number of assets in the various agencies.

Processing and Keywording – critical tasks!

I mentioned earlier in the month that I had been on a four-day jaunt to Dubai (I guess 6 days counting the hours in the air!) and I got back on the 5th April. I spent the next 3 weeks processing, keywording and uploading images of the city, and ended up with 440 images that have been uploaded and accepted in most places. Adobe has been more difficult than normal, with rejections because they don’t take editorial shots and also rejections for IP over two of the iconic buildings there (OK as editorial on the other sites) and also some rejections for “quality” of some of my extreme fisheye shots. I personally thought that they gave a feeling of being overpowered by the size of the buildings there, but their reviewers didn’t agree!

It will be interesting to see if any buyers are attracted to this sort of image! But my main point is that I spent probably 60 hours on this exercise, on top of the time and cost going to the city. I know that Alex recently wrote a blog post about the costs of a trip in Spain and wondered whether it would be profitable, and I’m thinking the same now about Dubai. I don’t think I will have much luck selling images as wall art, and so stock returns are all I can hope for. My direct costs were about $1500 (a very cheap airfare from United at $780 helped here), and 60 hours at $20 an hour (very, very low for the USA) would be another $1200. Earnings to date – 20 downloads for $7.38! Although, to be fair, it is not often that you instantly get sales following upload. I also took some videos of the Ain Dubai Observation Wheel which have only just gone live. I never seem to focus much on video, I’m afraid. I’ll update the story in future months (years) when I finally turn this into a profit!

I did complete my five articles about my time in the city under the broad heading of a Photographer’s Guide to Dubai. My thinking there was that I could get visitors and perhaps some incoming links to my BackyardImage website by writing what I hoped could become a popular resource and I did get a very pleasing comment from the Dubai based photographer whose own blog post I referenced in my first article. He has offered to accompany me to some of his favorite photo locations if I go back to the city, which was nice of him. This plan seems to be working as I now am number 3 in the Google search for that phrase, which I think is pretty impressive for a new article. Will I boost the ranking of BackyardImage via this means – perhaps!

Big Sellers in April

When we come to the best sellers for the month, it actually turned out that the best seller was actually a payment that Pond5 made for the use of their library for training AI models. I got $77 for that. Now will that be a reasonable payment for all the losses to come – probably not!

Pond5 was also in second place for a sale of this video taken off the back of a cruise ship of the setting sun over the wake of the ship. $66 for this one:

Shutterstock actually turned in a good performance this month as well, with $216 from sales of images where the earnings were more than $10. It is a bit sad that $10 is my threshold for a “big sale” but there we are! The best was an old image of the cap been unscrewed from a bottle of wine which earned $38. While screw top wines are very common in Europe, they are not in the USA, which perhaps helped me a little:

This next one, sold by SS for $35 shows the benefits of taking photos of distinctive buildings even though they may not be obviously popular. This is the courthouse at Leesburg in Virginia and overall it has earned $144 and it cost me next to nothing to take.

This next one, again on SS, has more of an interesting tale. A friend of mine was traveling through Liverpool airport in the UK and saw a big (perhaps 10 feet wide) print on the wall of the Arrivals area:

The image actually has my name and the Shutterstock copyright message in the top left and was a photo I took perhaps 12 years ago off Crosby beach of an art installation of lots of metal statues of the artist which are rusting away in the seawater. While it is thrilling to see the image up for display, I checked my earnings and found that it had earned $30 in its 12-year life and never more than a couple of dollars at a time – so no license for a large public print. I contacted the IP department of Shutterstock with the photo and they investigated with the airport (who said, I believe, that a contractor did it!) and eventually this month a license fee of $27.18 was added to my account as the airport bought the correct enhanced license. Perhaps there was a penalty, but who knows!! A warning for image thieves everywhere – I have eyes all over the world!

Adobe doesn’t tend to come up in this part of the post very often, but I did get $26 for this image of the Juul vaping system. Juul is in legal trouble (I think) over marketing to young people and so these images do tend to sell nicely. I was one of the first to photograph them for stock agencies (if I recall, I think I was the first on Shutterstock) and so I have always managed to keep my spot on the early pages. Overall, I have earned $4050 on Juul photos so that purchase of the vaping kit in Heathrow airport for $25 or so, was an investment that I can be proud of!

Fine Art Sales

All this focus on processing new images has totally stopped my social media efforts on promoting work for wall art, and perhaps the results of not promoting images makes it clear that social media is critical to wall art sales! On Fine Art America, I sold just two things. One a greeting card and the other an 8-inch canvas print. On Pictorem, nothing. And on Photo4Me, I had one decent sale of a diesel train that resulted in a profit of about $40.

I always think of Photo4Me as a place for UK or perhaps European images, but this american locomotive proves me wrong. I’ll have to upload some more images there!

Finally, in this area, I did post some images of the cherry blossoms in my small town of Morgantown in West Virginia, that included a couple of images of the amphitheater on the waterfront taken with the fisheye lens. The city has just had all the seats installed and I thought these looked quite dramatic. Anyway, the marketing department of the City contacted me to ask if I licensed images and so I agreed to license two to them for their own social media efforts. I did offer them for free for linking to my website, but they preferred the cleaner approach. Here is one of them:

I include my website (this is the Pictorem one) on these images for Facebook and I think they tracked me down that way. However, I think it is time I restarted my social media efforts again, unless it is just that wall art only sells in the winter! The overall picture looks like this. I really felt I had found my mojo through January. Now, I’m not so sure!

That rounds out my month – hope you are doing well in this difficult market!