Earnings from Photography in December 2023
Another year ends! It has taken me a while to write this – I was trying to finish the processing, keywording and uploading of all my photos from the recent trip down the Mississippi (in October!) and I finally did that with probably 700 images uploaded. Quite a few of the ones to Adobe are still in the review queue there, but I did a quick analysis of rejections from recent batches. There definitely was a change in their approach in April 2023 when I uploaded 292 and had 80 rejections, then in May I had 80 uploads and 45 rejections, followed by 216 uploads in June with 76 rejections, but when I look back at them, there were quite a few IP rejections (they were mainly Dubai images) and while we can argue with whether they are correct, it is a valid difference of opinion in many cases. They also rejected quite a few for Quality – extreme wide-angle shots mainly. But in this latest batch in November, I had 429 uploaded and 57 rejected. Again, some one that I thought might be illustrative editorial and they disagreed, then some duplicate type shots. But overall, nothing that was really worrying. What is interesting is that I am starting to see sales of these images on Adobe in particular, but on SS as well, which is a great sign.
That said, how was December? Not particularly exciting to be honest, but there are quite a lot of non-working days. Overall total earnings turned out to be $2483.
As you can see, December is always a poor month for earnings and this was similar to four of the six years in this analysis. For the record, here is my usual graph of files in the main agencies:
Is Stock Photography starting to lose its sparkle?
If you are sitting down, I will next show what is a more depressing graph. As you know, I have been spending more time marketing (and uploading) images to my main Print on Demand sites of Fine Art America and Pictorem. If you are interested in selling your art on Pictorem, please use this affiliate link.
In this graph, I have separated out the earnings from stock agencies from the sales of prints. I also spread out the one-off payments from the likes of Adobe when they buy an annual license for images for their free stock collection. There has always been a bit of a drop off towards the end of the year and into January (thanks Shutterstock!) but the pattern in 2023 looks much worse than the historical trends. A steady decline since March. If you did a trend line on that (which I know is not really accurate), you would be at zero in just a few years. It has reinforced in my mind that putting more focus into selling prints (however hard that is) might at least balance out my income for several more years.
Annual Earnings from Stock Photography and Print Sales
As it is the end of the year, here is my annual graph of earnings. This doesn’t look to bad, because, of course, the Fine Art stuff is helping counter the decline in stock sales:
This one also shows videos – I have continued to add a few videos, but to be honest, my heart really isn’t in the production of videos, so I ended up my Mississippi trip with maybe 7 videos that I uploaded compared to the 700 photos!
Stock Agency Earnings in December
As usual, Adobe Stock was in the lead once again with sales of $560. Then iStock took second place with $444 and poor old SS was way behind the November total of $610 with earnings of $407. What I have noticed in the few days of January is that Adobe has earned $146 on 175 downloads, and SS is on $26 for 95 downloads. Not a great start to 2024 for them. back to December, Alamy was next with $262 and then Canva with $171. Fine art sales came to $338 in December, so better than most agencies.
High Priced Sales
A few higher priced sales can make all the difference between an OK and a good month and this month I had just over $300 from 10 sales that earned more than $10. Alamy was the best, with this one from Shanghai in China that sold for $49:
And there was a second one of a modern building in Beijing that sold for $41. Shutterstock normally has a few good sales and this one, which is a composite of some old bits of wood with a lake sold for $36:
Then my cat for $33 on SS and this great shot of my feet paddling down the river in Morgantown sold for $28. I do like these odd higher priced sales but don’t want too many of them until my earnings percentage increases with SS this month!
Well, that is it for the month of December. Time will tell what 2024 brings!
Hi Steve, thanks again for this update. Interesting is that I have also experienced very high volume rejections from Adobe for a number of months. I took a break from uploading and my last batch was approved in full. They really did something to their review, I am guessing some type of AI because there were many people in the micro stock forum complaining about the same thing. It is possible that the rejections had different reasons, but they always indicated that it was technical.
Yes, I certainly saw more rejections during this year (as many others reported as you say). Hopefully we are through the worst of it – I don’t really have a problem with differences of opinion on whether something can be accepted for IP reasons but these quality rejections were annoying! I’m not sure how long I will keep doing these monthly reports – it is getting harder to work up the enthusiasm!
I too have had what I consider to be some add rejections from Adobe and now the wait time is 8 weeks! I do not comment much but I do read your blog and also this post on your earnings avidly. It would be sad if you stopped doing it.
Yes, they are annoying, and the wait time is pretty annoying as well, but the sales are good once they get online! I’ll continue to think about the future of the blog – maybe not every month. It used to be a good source of sales of my book(s) but there is much less interest in getting started in stock these days (and not surprisingly!). The Fine Art one didn’t sell as well as I had hoped.