Earnings from Photography in June 2024

A very belated report on my stock and fine art photography earnings in June 2024. I do have an excuse – we are moving to Austin, Texas in the next month or two and there has been a long list of things to do to buy a home there and start the process of selling my West Virginia home, including doing all the real estate photography – of course!

But did the earnings in June make me smile? Yes and no. Unfortunately, sales of stock photos continued their dismal performance, and to cap the misery, Adobe Stock decided to remove my best-selling image, a photo of a blank USA social security card, for IP reasons. This image earned an average of $100 a month on Adobe (much more that other sites) and so it is a big loss going forward. I did try to submit a modified version that removed a logo, but that was rejected for quality reasons…

However, Adobe did pick up 199 images for the free stock offer, giving me $995. For some reason, I forgot to nominate any videos for the similar offer, so nothing there. All this meant that total earnings for June 2024 ended up being $3455.

And my file count on some of the agencies:

Underlying trend of stock photo earnings

These one-off payments are great but do hide the underlying trend of earnings. As a result, I have started amortizing the one-off payment over the 12 months until we hopefully get another one. I have also separated out the earnings from selling prints (what I call my fine art photography). Over the past 3 or 4 years I have put an increasing amount of focus on that area to try to build an alternative income stream and, although I have been pretty absent from social media over the past couple of months, the results are promising. Here is a chart that just looks at stock earnings over the past 3 years after smoothing out those large one-off payments:

You can see just how badly the income from stock photography fell in June. Down below $2000 for the first time for almost a decade.

Stock Agency Sales Performance

As usual, Adobe Stock was in the number one position with income of $1585. However, removing that $995 gives a more ordinary number of $590, quite a bit below the normal levels of $750 to $850. Apart from the loss of my best seller, the month just seemed slow across all agencies. Then Shutterstock was pretty poor at $382. iStock was down in the dumps as well at $233 and then Alamy was $184. Finally, Canva was around its normal level with $171. All told, a poor month, indeed!

The drop in the number of higher priced sales is really driving a lot of this. In May, I had 16 files selling for more than $10 to earn $309. In June, this was 6 files for $142. So far in July – one, and that was at EyeEM for $15!

Fine Art Photography Sales

At last, a bright spot. I had $204 worth of profit on Fine Art America, $47 on Pictorem, $58 in local sales and $307 from a company that invited me to submit some images for wall murals. Then with a company that leases prints earning $75, I ended up with the $693 in Fine Art Sales.

Final Thoughts

My adjusted earnings for June ended up being $2605 after removing the one-off Adobe payment but adding in 1/12th of that to represent the earnings each month on those free images. Not too bad, and I’m certainly glad I put some focus into non-stock earning opportunities.

I’ve also reworked my Etsy store after listening to a webinar by Craig Alexander about how to increase sales there. I’m too busy to put most of the approaches into practice, but here is the new Etsy store with a reduced selection of print options all the way up to 90 x 40 inch three panel prints! I’ll write more about that in due course.

Good luck with your endeavors!