Earnings from Photography in June 2023

I think we start this monthly report on earnings with a short word. Wow!

This turned out to be a remarkable month. I was expecting a good month because of the Adobe offer to “buy” a one year license on certain images to offer them free to buyers, but even excluding the income from that, I set a pretty high bar. Total earnings for June turned out to be $4433! My graph with the Adobe free license includes is as follows:

And this is with a portfolio that includes the following assets at the various stock agencies:

Adobe Stock Free Image and Video buyout

This is becoming an annual event now – Adobe Stock offers to buy the licensing rights for a 12 month period for images and videos which they then offer at no cost to their buyers. I have submitted most of what they recommend each year (removing ones that I think might sell better for me), and this year, I had 9 videos (for $72) and 212 photos for $1060 accepted into their free collection. Looking at the images, they are not ones that have sold well on Adobe, but it is always a bit of a risk. This year, I decided that anything that could easily be created by AI systems might as well go into the “free collection” and the resultant extra income of $1132 is included in my total above. Without that, I still achieved a very impressive $3301 for June. That compares very favorably with the $2812 for May. In fact, the last time I got this much was in April 2022 when I earned $3457. While most agencies did pretty well that month, the key factor was $716 in Fine Art Sales including $432 from Pictorem.

Agency performance in sales

As we might expect, Adobe Stock was well in the lead with $1979, which includes the $847 for normal sales in the month. That itself is almost a record, although I did earn $857 from Adobe in March of this year. Next in the list is Shutterstock with $540, then almost a tie between iStock and Alamy with around $367 each. Canva was good as well with $260 this month and then we are dropping fast. Pond5 was pretty good at $135, but that did include a license upgrade on a previously sold video that netted $100. I wasn’t able to identify the specific video that was upgraded, and it wasn’t worth much effort to find out which it was. Then we are in the weeds.

What was a very pleasant surprise was that I managed to sell quite a number of prints this month. Fine Art America came in nicely at $373, then a sale on Photo4me in the UK and one locally all helped. Even Society6 came in with one sale of a print that netted $31. Altogether, these print sales came to $535 compared to $232 last month. I’ll talk more about that below.

High priced sales in June 2023

I always like to see how much I earned from “high-priced” sales. It is a bit of a joke that these days, we think of anything over $10 as high-priced. Film photographers everywhere will be turning in their graves at the thought of such low values being assigned to our work! However, June gave me $563 from sales of assets for more than $10. There were 16 sales in total, one of which was that $100 video license from Pond5. The highest earner was with Alamy and was an editorial shot of some fine wines that I had shipped to me. This one sold for a net of $77.

So, I manage to earn money from the wine I buy to enjoy in an evening!

Alamy also came up as a winner with two sales of images from Equatorial Guinea that I didn’t upload very widely. This is a difficult country to visit, and photography is not altogether welcome there. This image was taken as the car we were in was going around a roundabout:

This and a different image were sold for $53 net each. My famous cat earned a download for $34 on Shutterstock, and this image of an ornate fountain in Nuremburg in Germany earned $37 on SS:

SS also gave me a sale for $36 for this shot of me filling out an absentee ballot form during the Covid lockdown days. Simple stuff to produce:

Fine Art Sales in June 2023

As I mentioned earlier, I had quite a boost from print sales (what I call my Fine Art Sales) in June, rising to $535 from a run of months in the $200s. I count Fine Art America ($373), TurningArt ($58), Pictorem ($0), Society6 ($32), Photo4Me ($45) and local print sales or licenses ($28) in this total. It does require more work to upload them (although most sites are not bad) and it obviously requires a lot more effort to try to bring attention to them, which generally means Instagram, Twitter and Facebook efforts. As I’ve explained in the past, I find the Facebook groups the most valuable route to sales, especially if you can build some sort of rapport with the group so that you are known there and in people’s mind if they ever think a print might be a good idea. I had three sales of a local waterfall on Fine Art America this month, which I am pretty sure would have occurred because of my involvement in a local “growing up” group on Facebook.

I also sold a print of Santa Barbara courthouse in California taken way back in 2012.

The original was far less attractive – just goes to show what a new (appropriate) sky can do to an image!

I did learn from one of the forum discussions on FAA that not all the images that you upload on FAA are actually indexed on Google. In fact, quite a small proportion appears to be. There are some tricks to try to increase this, and I’m investigating more. I’ll report back if I can find anything that works!

Here is my history of these fine art sales:

I think that rounds out the month. I don’t expect I will report anything like this next month!