Earnings from photography in November 2023

What an intriguing month! Firstly, I had a lot of Fine Art print sales that I reported on last week, then I had the conclusion of a private sale of files for prints that I’ll mention below and finally, an OK month for stock photos. The end result was a record $3940 for the month, all told!

My normal chart first:

And, for a change, a graph showing the growth of files from an agency that accepts most images – Deposit Photos, and one that doesn’t take editorial shots and more recently has been pretty fierce in terms of rejections – Adobe Stock:

As you can see, quite a jump in the last month – I have uploaded almost 500 images in November, all from the trip that I took down the Mississippi and I probably have several hundred still to process and keyword. A mammoth task, and only time will tell if it was worthwhile.

Earnings on Fine Art Print work

I reported quite a number of sales in the post last week about how my Fine Art stuff had finally taken off. All told, those sales resulted in $530 of margin. I even had a sale on Photo4Me, which is quite rare. I’ve had a couple of sales so far this month as well. But the big success was the closing of a deal from a company in DC who wanted 14 of my photos to prints for their office. They were going to print and frame them. This is always tricky as the same images are available in many cases on stock sites and so we know how much they charge for a full-sized digital download. In the end, we agreed on $1060 for the files, which I think is OK for both parties. So that made my “fine art” activities worth $1590 to me this month. Not a regular occurrence, but nice to be recognized. They had seen my work on various websites and did a Google search on one of the images, I think.

Stock Agency Performance

Shutterstock pulled something out of the bag on the last day of the month with a sale of an image for $105:

So SS came in with earnings for the month of $610, only just falling into second place behind Adobe with their $658. I was disappointed with iStock for October – just $355 instead of earnings in the $400s. When I checked, there were no images that made more than $10 in the month, which is the difference between a great month and a poor month. Also Canva slumped yet again to $183. It is not often I drop below $200 with them. Alamy were sort of OK with $200 that included $25 from ASCRL Summer Distribution. Zoonar strangely hit a ball out of the park with total sales of $107. Unfortunately, this included two big sales from Alamy and so I got less than I would normally get with a direct sale. In the past, I let Zoonar send files to Alamy because their system of uploading was so complex and there was an idea that some companies had a better search ranking and so a Zoonar image might be an advantage. I stopped using them for Alamy several years ago, but the older files are still there. And then we are in the sub-$100 agencies.

What is concerning is this graph:

This shows the earnings from stock compared to the earnings from Prints.

Just look how the stock earnings have been falling since March 2023. A couple of months broke the trend, but the end result is $2265 – the lowest since January 2022 with the famous SS reduction in percentage earnings at the start of each year. It will be interesting to see what new low is set in January 2024!

Best Earning Images in November 2023

Shutterstock had the best earning images at both ends of the month. Early on, I sold this one of Alexandria in Virginia for $105 and the one above also for $105 at the end of the month.

Then my cat sold on SS again for $35.

This photo of Charlotte Amalie in St Thomas sold for $30 on Alamy:

I had a couple of videos on Adobe for $28 and $25, but I rarely get a high-priced sale on Adobe for a photo. Looking in more detail in November, the highest price image on Adobe is $3.30.

That about rounds out the month. It will be interesting to see how December works out.