Earnings from Photography in May 2023

Another month that resulted in almost the same earnings as the previous month. Not sure if that is good or not! Anyway, earnings in May 2023 from photography turned out to be $2804 compared to $2876 in April! However, both months were considerably below the previous year. Here is the historical graph of earnings.

As usual, here are my files online on various agencies. Not much change in May.

Agency Performance

Once again, Adobe Stock took the lead with earnings of $732 in the month. Shutterstock were not too far behind this month with $631, helped by a payment of $87 from their AI fund. Then iStock as usual with $412 and Canva with $225. Alamy was nothing special with $167, and then we are down in the noise.

I revisited my Fine Art totals for 2023 this month (and total earnings as a result) as I realized that I was not reporting earnings from Photo4Me in the UK and also I have my prints in two local galleries, and have had several private deals where someone wants to either use one of my photos or needs a digital file because they are printing several photos from different artists and they want them all to look the same. So, I have added both those sources of photography income into my spreadsheets. That has made my Fine art earnings look better this year and May ended up being $232 from all sources. The main ones were two sales on Fine Art America netted $57 and my usual set of images on loan via Turning Art generated $58. I then had an image purchased for the cover of the West Virginia farming association magazine (which I’ll post next month when I see the final cover.)

Best Selling Assets

Before I get into this, I’ve been thinking about the impact of AI on photography and stock photos in particular. Alex has written a great article about his thoughts on AI and I must admit to agreeing with a lot of it. That view that simple still life shots (such as my surf board image which has earned (in its various forms) going on for $4000 in its lifetime, must be seriously at risk of being generated by a quick AI query. I took this into account in deciding which of my images to put forward in Adobe’s annual purchase deal for free assets. I’m not sure how quickly AI will take over these easy shots as anyone with a Shutterstock account that wants a surfboard image can get a ready made one (mine!) immediately in their subscription and so would hardly spend the time to create one using AI. What might be lost first is something a bit more complex that my simple shot that requires some compositing – that would be one to use AI for, I think.

So onto this month’s best sellers. Unfortunately, nothing really brought in the big dollars, with the highest earner being just $31 this month:

This one is unlikely to be taken over by AI! I then had this one sell on Alamy for $30 net:

And this one sold for $30 on SS as well:

I suppose this one would be an easy AI creation? Now one that might be safe for a while is this that sold for $15 on 123RF!

Perhaps someone wanted it to train an AI system on creating hands!

Finally, I sold 4 videos of the ocean in front of or besides a cruise ship for $70 this month. Not a lot, but nice to see!

Well, that is all I can think of for this month. With one last remark perhaps about social media. I wrote an article about a stroll around a lovely English town called Ellesmere and joined a Facebook group called “For the Love of Shropshire” and posted a link to it. Then I received an email from BBC radio saying they had seen and read the article and wanted to interview me about my thoughts as a visitor and my photographs. Pity it is on the radio, but a chance to mention my website perhaps! So Social Media does work sometimes!