Earnings from stock and fine art photography March 2024
Some months are good, some months stink… After a very poor January, February, even with fewer days, came back like a lion (isn’t that saying supposed to be about March?) And then March came along, and I ended up with total earnings of $2421, a big drop from the $2995 I saw in February. The graph looks like this – which shows how far this March has fallen from previous years:
In fact, this is the worst March earnings total since March 2013! Incidentally, I didn’t add any images in March to my portfolio so if you want to know the total number of assets, they are in the February report.
What is happening to the Stock photo earnings?
I’ve started keeping a graph that separates out the Stock earnings from my Fine Art Print on demand earnings.
While the earnings from what I call “Fine Art” are still relatively small, it is nice to see that they are maintaining some sort of stability after I really tried hard to start selling this sort of work in 2021. In fact, I wrote a book about my approach if you are interested! I’ll come on to discuss what happened there in March, but just look at the red columns above! With the exception of a couple of months, it has been a non-stop fall since March 2023 and at that rate, I will be lucky to be earning $1000 in a year’s time!
The answer to the question in March is twofold I think. Firstly, as in January, there was a massive drop in the licensing of higher value images. For comparison, January had 7 downloads of files earning more than $10 for a total of $240. February was back on a more normal trend of 23 downloads for $435 and now March is back in the doldrums with 7 downloads for $191. So at least a couple of hundred dollars has disappeared in those higher value downloads between February and March.
How about Stock Agency Performance?
The second factor was the abysmal performance of iStock in February (announced in March). I normally get $350 to $500 from iStock each month. But March payout was down to $174! I’ve seen the reported answer of a customer paying for things that should have been free (!), but that answer just makes no sense to me. To have so many contributors reporting such low results must have meant that the customer was being billed tens of millions of dollars. And did we see that high level of billing in November and December last year? Of course we didn’t. I got the normal earnings in November and December – nothing unusual at all.
Then Shutterstock, which is normally the agency with the highest number of high value downloads, had just two for a total of $50. As a result, their earnings dropped from $610 in February to $370 this past month.
Adobe continued to ignore all this noise and came in with $765, marginally down from February. Alamy was pretty good with $253 and Canva was sort of OK with $171. Then all the other agencies were less than $100 and generally a bit worse than in February.
High value stock sales in February 2024
Well, this will be a short paragraph! Alamy was the winner with a couple of downloads:
This one, which is by no means a good photograph of some details of the Temple of Hephaestus in Greek Agora in Athens, earned $51.50 and I think it is the first time it has ever sold! Alamy also had a sale for $40 of this photo of my beautifully organized file drawer showing some tax years:
Then SS had a sale of a panorama of Ilfracombe Harbor for $24:
As well as a photo of the Supreme Court in Washington DC – a good seller because they always seem to be in the news for something!
Adobe had one sale of a USA Social security card concept for $26, which is unusual for them. And finally, Dreamstime did me out of a print sale with a $13 download (which I think is their print license) of this image of Alexandria:
Fine Art Sales in March
Luckily, my Print on Demand earnings showed a bit of an uptick in March with total earnings of $434. I had a sale of a framed print of Morgantown WV on Pictorem:
And I also sold a 50-inch-wide print of a view in Kauai on Pictorem again:
And on Fine Art America I sold three photo print copies of the Mountaineer Statue against fall colors:
That’s about it for this month. Hoping that this decline in stock earnings can be arrested in April!
Sorry that I writing you not about this month sales, but I have other general question, may be you can share you stats about that. You shoot a lot of cities and landmarks, so I think a lot of these pictures are only editorial. What is your experience in editorial? What % from all sales editorial takes? On which sites do you upload editorial images?
Editorial images sell OK – I don’t have a way of really looking at sales between Editorial and Commercial though, and so I can’t really give you any facts about that. Microstockr Pro has no way to distinguish between them that I have found. (Although I just tried something and I might be able to sort them!) I’ll have to do some research on that. I submit editorial to SS, Adobe (when it is a product or company), Deposit Photos, Dreamstime, 123RF, Alamy, I think.
Hi Steve, always a pleasure to follow your journey. A quick question on Canva. Do you know how they calculate their contributor earnings? I’ve got a few assets there that seem to be used hundreds, if not thousands of times (both for Applies and Exports), but all I get is 1 dollar per month, which is just terrible!
I don’t know the specifics, but I think they moved, a few years ago, to a subscription scheme where you get a percentage of the total subscription income based on your share of downloads. You don’t get to see which of your images were popular, from what I know. I uploaded quite a few PNGs with transparent backgrounds a few years ago – I think those are quite popular because they are easy to incorporate into other designs.