Earnings from sale of stock photos March 2013

Although March is supposed to be one of the best months of the year for the sale of stock photos, this month was good, but not great for me. I have continuing worries about the volatility of Shutterstock earnings – and I’ll do a separate post on that shortly – but the month ended up with a total of $1980. Definitely good, but with all the efforts at unloading images in late Feb/early March, I was hoping for a little better!

Shutterstock was the leader, as usual, with $892 – not a best ever, but second best. iStock is falling through the floor for me – down to $240 again, and probably $90 of that is now coming from the partner sales at much lower prices. 123RF is still doing well – I get some steady sales now from that agency, and it ended at $142. Dreamstime – still good, and I really like the fact that they are taking a much less harsh line on similar images these days. My last uploads have had a 80% success rate rather than the 60% I was used to. I wish there was a way to find out which good images they had rejected in the past and reupload them!

The star of the month was Pond5. I took the decision to stop going for bottom feeder buyers on this site and priced my largest size download at $40. As a result, I get fewer downloads, but the earnings are much better. I ended up with $125 this month from that site (although that does include two videos priced at $60, or which I got $30.) Some of the smaller sites seem to be losing all headway – almost nothing from probably 10 of my sites. Good job there is not much effort in supporting them!

Here are the graphs:

Growth in Photo Earnings

Files on line March 2013

Earnings in March 2013

Proportions of earnings March 2013