Earnings from sale of stock photos online in May 2013

A month of ups and downs to be honest! First the great news; I beat all previous records on income from Shutterstock with earnings in the month of $1004. The first time that I passed the $1000 stage. After a cold month without Enhanced license downloads in April, I ended the month of May with six of them. In addition, I had a great month for Single downloads as well, which all helped create this best ever month. I’ve been looking in Shutterstock in a bit more detail and there is some good news in the detail besides the top line number.

First, here is how the earnings on that site have been growing, split into the main download categories of subscriptions, On demand, Enhanced licenses and Single download:

Shutterstock – earnings per license type

This is showing a continuing growth, but it is nice to see that almost half my income comes from the higher value downloads. I then carried on the analysis to see what impact that had on the earnings per download. We all know that the top line number that everyone remembers is that you get $0.33 per image on Shutterstock – peanuts, is the common retort. However, as this next graph shows, I am not getting $0.33 per download – it was actually almost $0.80 in May. Of course that is a lot less than macrostock, but it is also multiplied by a lot more downloads.

Earnings per image on Shutterstock

This $ per download line is also growing over time – so either my photos are getting better, or Shutterstock is successfully introducing more ways for buyers to license images – some of which are considerably more expensive than the subscription model. What this graph also shows is the money I made based on how many images I had available for sale. This $ per online file shows a very slight upward movement, but the good news here is that it is stable over a long period of time. If you look at the blue line, which represents the number of images I have for sale on Shutterstock (ignore the axis here), I’ve more than doubled my image count, but that earnings per image line has not been changed much – there is a proportionality between the number of images online and earnings. Add more images, get more money!

Moving on to the bigger picture for the month, the other sites were OK, but not great. Almost all of them were less than the month before, and so the end of month total ended up at $2045 compared to $2245 in April. April was helped by a large sale in iStock’s partner program, which increased iStock earnings that month to almost $350, but we dropped to an estimated $276 for May. Other sites were similar – solid, but not exciting. This month, only 123RF and Alamy beat the $100 mark (apart from SS and iS mentioned before):

Earnings in May 2013

As a proportion of my total earnings, SS continued to dominate:

Proportion of earnings per agency

Files on line didn’t change much from April for most sites, with the exception of iStock. I took advantage of the recent increase in the weekly upload limits (from 24 to 999) to upload about 700 images that I had keyworded in DeepMeta, but hadn’t been able to upload because of the limits. These only went live late in May, but already some of the new ones have sold, so perhaps iStock will pick up next month. I have a lot of images from a trip to London and Germany that are still in the “development” stage, so I need to work hard now and get those online in June.

Growth of online files

Finally, the overall earnings chart – still showing very solid progress:

Growth in Earnings