Earnings from Photography in September 2024

A full month here in Texas and I’m more settled and there are fewer boxes around. I even got my Epson 3880 printer installed as well, and so color prints are on the horizon! Weather can be a little boring:

But onto the main subject with a quick diversion. Taras Kushnir has a survey for earnings and activities for stock photographers that he will analyze and publish on his blog. Worth completing to see how things are going in general for stock photography. Also, Alex has a great monthly report on his activities. I’m moving sideways into print photography; Alex is doing more commercial work that has grown out of his start with stock imagery. Interesting read.

This past month, as I previewed last week, was a great one, mainly because of some very nice print sales on Pictorem. I wrote about the earnings from there in this article. Due to all this activity (and the Adobe Firefly contributor bonus of $175), I ended the month with earnings of $4009. Very satisfied! For those interested in the details, I report the actual earnings in this overall total and in the main graph below, but when I split out fine art from stock earnings, I remove the one-off payments such as this AI bonus and spread it across the next 12 months so that you can see more of a pattern in earnings rather than have these big one-off months spoiling the trend.

Number of photos and videos on the main stock agencies

And, of course, the number of assets that are generating these sales:

I have around 600 videos online but am not very active in creating or uploading more videos. They used to earn quite a premium over photos, but that has fallen in recent years. I’ve also been very relaxed about uploading new images recently. Too many other things have been going on, and so the pace of uploads has been negligible this year. Interesting that, in the short term at least, nothing much seems to have changed in the earnings. I have added a few new ones this past month – mainly ones taken around my new home of all the building activities. They have been accepted, but no sales so far!

Here is the graph of overall progress in building this portfolio:

Earnings between stock agencies and photo printing companies

While we are looking at overall numbers, here is the graph that splits out fine art print sales from stock earnings:

This one shows two interesting things – how variable the print earnings are with this remarkable month of $1530 in print related earnings compared to $126 a couple of months ago. I’m starting to focus more on my Etsy store now that I have had 9 sales in total and have six 5-star reviews for my products. I deliberately gave some very high discounts (70% in some cases) to friends to buy these images, but a necessary step in giving my store some credibility. As a new store, Etsy was holding back some of my earnings but have now released that with the arrival of the great reviews. I’m going to try some approaches using Facebook Groups to build up traffic to the store (and add more photos!)

The other thing of note is that the stock earnings have reversed their unfortunate trend of steady declines over the past year. Three goodish months doesn’t make a new trend, but at least the regular fall has been reversed for now.

And one last graph! This one just shows the stock earnings grouped by month:

This shows that my best earning months are usually in the spring to early summer with another smaller peak in the autumn and fall. December and January are the worst months for me.

Earnings from the main stock photo agencies

No surprise that Adobe Stock was, once again, my number one agency with total earnings of $919 which includes the $175 Firefly bonus. Luckily, I added a lot of images late last year from my trip down the Mississippi which counted against the Firefly bonus. Interestingly, these images and videos from that trip from Minnesota to New Orleans turned out to be one of the most profitable in terms of earnings from the images. So far, about $1590 from the stock agencies plus $640 from the print of a railway bridge in Dubuque, Iowa. It just shows that travel photography of less well-travelled areas can still be a reasonable earner.

iStock turned in a very reasonable $453 for August (reported in September) and so Shutterstock was in third position yet again with $433. As I’ve mentioned before, the base level of SS earnings is not good at all ($233 in June) but the occasional higher priced sales normally save the month. Alamy (plus some images grandfathered into a Getty account) gave me $218, then Canva with $175. Dreamstime managed to move into the big league with $100 in September and even Zoonar managed to earn $55 instead of the $15 to $30 I normally earn there. A few higher priced sales from their partners makes all the difference!

Higher earning images in September

So which images made the difference this past month? I forgot to mention this in previous articles, but Getty/iStock sold four of my Mississippi images for $26.40 each in July:

The highest priced sale in September was this election one sold on Alamy and earning $54:

But SS was not far behind with a $50 sale of the Infinity bridge in Dubai.

This was a trip that definitely didn’t earn very much, although I did enjoy it and walked many miles! I wrote about what I managed to see in my four days in Dubai here.

SS also gave me a nice sale of $35 for this image illustrating the budget issues in the USA:

Dreamstime achieved its $100 payout with three $13 sales of various places on that Mississippi trip. I think these might be print licenses, but I’m not sure.

Finally, there was a $28 sale of a video on Adobe Stock looking down at waves from a cruise ship:

Altogether, I made $364 from 17 downloads that earned more than $10 in September. Another reason for a good month.

I think that rounds out the month. Hope you had some success as well!