Earnings from Photography in January 2023

Where on earth has Steve been to be so late with this earnings report? Well, I’ve just got back from a trip to South America and have 2800 images to go through. Just not sure what the market is like for photos of penguins, but I will soon find out! As a result, I had little visibility of my earnings until this morning and I must admit that I am pleasantly surprised. I did see the email from Shutterstock telling me that they were paying $340 into my Paypal account and so my expectations for the month based on that were very low. Luckily, it was just Shutterstock that hit a new low point – the overall earnings for the month ended up being $2939, one of my best January results ever.

My file count was pretty static over the month, as you might expect. Here is the graph:

Sales with each stock photo agency

As you might expect, the agency that we love to hate came in very badly with the reset of the commission percentages on January 1st. I did manage to move up the scale quite quickly and am now at Level 4 for images but still Level 1 for videos. Even after several years, this leaves a very bad taste in my mouth – simple money grab for the shareholders.

However, the agency that seems to care about us, Adobe, worked their magic and gave me $679 in sales. Not my best, but still pretty good. The one that surprisingly came in third position was Fine Art America, with overall profit from 8 sales of various products of $420. Alamy was next with a very nice $401, followed by Getty with $325. Canva was next with $170, although that has fallen each month recently. Pictorem was the only remaining site that broke the $100 mark with a profit of $141 on two print sales.

Notable sales of images in January

Without a doubt, Alamy was the winner with higher priced sales, taking 4 of the 9 slots for images and videos that made more than $10. The best was this composite which was supposed to represent money growing from your savings:

I guess this was used by a bank to show how higher interest rates would generate growth – but it earned me $123 net from Alamy. Then this one earned $50 net from Alamy:

I also sold a couple of videos of gold-colored coins on Pond5 for a total of $54, probably because there was a run up in the price of real gold in January.

Fine Art sales

Once again, my Fine Art stuff did well, with total sales of $617 compared to $533 last month. I’ll write about the images that sold as prints over on BackyardImage, but the highest margin was on this 36 inch framed print of an old painting that I spent a lot of time restoring:

This had a profit of $152. I wrote about restoring this image over on my “customer” site.

I’m pleased with the way my social media efforts are working out. I’ll keep this up, I think! Hope you are all doing as well as you can in this problematic business!