Earnings from Stock Photography August 2020

A slow month all round – slow in earnings, and definitely very slow in terms of the effort I put into stock this month! I did have a side line in photographing images for a friend of mine who sells LED lightbulbs on Amazon and he wanted to improve his store – so we did a deal where I would create new images for his store and upload them. If you are in the UK and need an LED lightbulb, check them out!!

Interestingly little project that let me practice some lighting skills as well as presentation and graphic design. In the images above, only the body is from the original photo. The bayonet was from a different shot as I wanted the two lugs at the sides for a more pleasing image. The shadow is artificial and the lighted area is actually a radial gradient from grey to white to give more an impression of being illuminated and to remove pesky reflections in the plastic. I’ve also uploaded the single images isolated against white as stock photos – not sure how successful they will be but all it took was a little keywording. So as a result, I only uploaded 22 images and 7 videos in the month. Certainly well below my usual level of activity!

The month’s earnings…

The month turned out to be somewhat similar to previous Augusts in earnings as well, with a total of $2781. Last August was definitely a low earner with around $2500 so I guess I shouldn’t complain about sales in a summer month during a pandemic! The normal graph shows the trend:

This is a chart to wake you up in the mornings – sorry about those bright luminous colors! As you can see, August was down on July, which itself was well down on June, but historically my earnings pick up from this point. As I mentioned, I didn’t add many images and videos in the month, so the overall numbers of assets are pretty static:

Video Sales save the month!

Videos turned out to be more successful than normal in August with total earnings of $282. The star here was a video I took just before catching an early morning flight from Washington Dulles airport way back in 2011. I remember leaving my wife with the luggage as I headed for the car park to catch the dawn light over the terminal. This particular video sold for $115 on Pond5 in August to bring its total earnings to over $700.

I’ve recently moved to the option with Pond5 where they can adjust the price to maximize earnings. I don’t know if that will prove to be the best option (compared to setting my own prices, but I thought it was worth trying. I am sure that the buyer of this one (which is HD) also bought some sort of legal protection as well to bring the price up to $115. Pond5 sold a total of $175 in videos in the month including one of my green screen efforts for $30:

I don’t recall ever seeing one of my videos in the real world, so I have no idea where this was used.

I also had $98 in earnings from six video sales on Shutterstock although two of them were for $0.84 each. The subjects were the normal close ups of a gold coin plus the opioid shots. Here is a chart of my video earnings over the months:

It would be great to see the past few months as a solid upward trend, but I’m not so foolish as to expect that. Each month does what it does!

Image sales – not many big payouts

As mentioned above, Alamy was a great agency with several reasonable (for these days) sales, but the biggest seller was actually Shutterstock with this one of the painting of a Puerto Rico flag on a tree root after hurricane Maria in 2018 which sold for $35 on the last day of the month. I thought it was a pretty good image to illustrate the disaster and I marked it as editorial. Altogether it has earned $118 since 2016. And I do recall selling it as a print as well, although I would have to dig back in my memory to recall the exact details.

A much more reliable seller is this perennial from a visit to the cherry blossoms in Washington DC. It sold 18 times in total this month for a total of $52 although there were two sales on SS for $29 and $13 in that total. Incidentally, Microstockr Pro came out with a new release with some great enhancements that let you see what individual images have earned both on the chosen agency as well as all other agencies. That certainly helps understand which images are doing well more widely.

I recently studied my results to see how much the number of large sales (a bit laughable to call a $10 sale a “large sale”!) impacted the months results. This graph shows total earnings from images and videos, then the image sales alone and finally, the value of the image sales over $10:

I actually created this a few months back, and didn’t include it because I didn’t really know what it showed. Apart from the overall level of large sales being somewhat static over the years with some random peaks, it doesn’t really show much of a trend to be honest. Perhaps one of you can see the relevance!

Fine Art disappoints, sort of…

Its a long time since I sold a high value print on Fine Art America, the last one was in June this year. However, I did get one more sale of the Formby beach on Photo4Me for 20 pounds profit, but Society6 has been doing OK again with a total of $65 in August after $58 in July. These tend to be smaller sales (and I have few products there), but it is tending to spread out a little to include different images. Here are the subjects sold in August:

The larger print was this one that I created from a photo of the skyline in San Francisco with a moody black and white treatment:

Every time I see sales on that site I plan to add some more products. Now that I am seeing a bit more traction, perhaps September will be the time to upload some new images!

Agency Performance

Alex Rotenberg has his golden turd agency of the month, won this month by Bigstockphoto, but I treat all my agencies with the respect they deserve! Once again, Shutterstock took the prize (for highest earnings) of $752, almost the same as last month which was $760. Looks like the Shutterstock cap has been re-introduced… Unfortunately, Adobe didn’t do anything like as well with earnings of $481 compared to $582 last month. iStock took a dive as well from $449 to $325 and although Alamy had more image sales this month, it still ended down with $184. What made the difference for me this month was Pond5 with $203 (compared with $26), Dreamstime motoring along now with $114 and good old Canva still delivering with its promise to double earnings and paying $298. I dread to think what we will get once that offer expires (in September I think) as their reporting is all over the place at the moment. If I did have an award for consistently poor performance, it would have to be shared between StockFresh and MostPhotos, both of which rarely get to the heady heights of $3 in earnings.

I always wait until the month finally ends before doing my spreadsheets, as I always hope that the final day will bring forward some unexpected sales. Yesterday didn’t disappoint with total sales of $95 including the Puerto Rico flag mentioned above, and, at the last moment, a $12 sale on Shutterstock for one of my new election stock photos:

Here’s hoping for a calm and peaceful voting season in the USA…