Earnings from stock photography (and video) in March 2018

March turned out to be a pretty decent month for earnings, with a total of $3099. Now that I am focusing more on video, I can report that $198 of that was from video sales! For a change, here is a quarter view of earnings with a very colorful approach to brighten your day:

As you can see, the final quarter of 2017 was my best ever, but this first quarter was not far behind. Most of the sites did pretty well in March. Shutterstock was just less than $900, but iStock really excelled in the month (of February) to come in with $579. Easily the most I have earned from that site. Looking at the specific images that sold on that site, my shots from a trip to South West Virginia to the New River Gorge area really paid off. I sold three of this image:

for $84 and this one of the bridge has earned $558 in total with the majority coming from iStock (not all in February!):

I certainly hope iStock is going to maintain this blistering pace! Adobe Stock was not far behind with $515 – again a monthly record. My next biggest earner was Canva with $273.

On my monthly chart, there is also a pretty nice pattern appearing:

As you can see, almost all of the months in late 2017 and now 2018 have been higher than the same month in the previous year. February was not just enough to beat a record set back in 2015, but it was close and now March has just crept about March 2017.As you can also see, my earnings are not particularly seasonal. I do have tax images that sell at this time of the year, but I don’t tend to have big sales around each of the major holidays. The summer is normally lower, but time will tell if this pattern is repeated again this year.

Notable large sales in March came from a $71 sale of my bag of ice on Shutterstock followed by a later $30 sale:

That one has earned over $1730 in its life. Not bad for a $10 bag of ice!

In the month I only added around 100 images. I was on vacation in Spain and Italy for part of the month and so am working through a big collection of images at the moment and haven’t had much opportunity to do my uploads as yet:

This then gives me the following totals on various sites I submit to:

Looking forward, I need to work on my latest images (and some videos that I mentioned in my last post). Quite a number of them are editorial this time – we were in Valencia at the time of the La Fallas festival where each neighborhood creates incredibly detailed statues and models and then they have a massive fireworks festival and burn their statues to the ground. We weren’t there for the burning, but there were plenty of fantastic creations around every corner in the city:

Statue created for the Las Fallas Festival in Valencia in Spain