Earnings from Stock Photography Feb 2020

A short but pretty depressing month from the point of view of earnings from stock photography in February 2020! Just $2275 for the month compared with $2993 in February 2019 and the lowest monthly total since July 2017. It is hard this month to find many bright spots among the agencies, but I’ll try! This is the overall picture of earnings over the past few years:

I hope this is a one off poor month, but I don’t think I am alone in thinking that things are getting difficult. Whether it is the way that the media is focused on the corona virus, or just the lack of interest in my sort of images and videos – it is hard to tell.

Within this total, I normally have a good performance from my videos, but not in February. Just $213.

As you can see, video sales do tend to be more volatile as the higher value of each one can make a big difference to the monthly totals. To complete the round up of charts, I added 214 images and videos in the month of February (mainly travel shots from a vacation in Hawaii I took in January) to bring the totals per agency to these:

As you can see, DepositPhotos has the highest number of images as they don’t seem to reject anything I upload! The total there is 15,994 images. Shutterstock gets both images and videos and at the end of February I had 13898 images and 503 videos online. I’ve just got back from a second visit to the Pacific (this time to Kauai) and so I have another bunch of images and videos to process and upload in the coming weeks. I did a lot of drone work this time, mainly flying out to sea to get a different perspective on the beaches and coastline – maybe those new angles will generate some sales! Travel is a tough market, although it is also one that it is difficult for the majority of stock photographers to undertake and so it does make my portfolio more unique. I do get a lot of pleasure from creating something that I think is more like a work of art, so I can’t complain! I did write an article about whether you could make money just doing travel photography last year – in short, the answer was that it was a useful component of my work, but the concept and studio stuff was necessary to make a regular income.

I concentrated on creating panoramas, partly because the camera is “only” 20 Mpixels and also so that I could keep the drone within eyesight and not lose it far out at sea! A panorama from a drone also has the interesting tendency to make the closest bit of land more dominant and gives a more dramatic viewpoint. Incidentally, I wrote a blog post for the competition over on the Dreamstime blog about getting started commercially with a drone. If you think that article is interesting, please click on the green “Useful” button on the left. The competition is for the most useful article so your votes certainly help.

But back to the results. Shutterstock was pretty poor with just $680 for the month. I have to go back to December 2018 to find a lower month. I had 3 images that sold for more than $10 and although I sold 9 videos for a total of $126, these were all low value ones including one for $1.50! I’m used to seeing that from Getty, but Shutterstock has generally been better for me. I had 3 Juul related sales at $13.50 each early in the month, but it was also nice to see some travel videos selling (if only for $13.50!) This one was created with a GoPro on a suction mount on the hood of my rental car in Maui. I’ve no idea why I left the reversing onto the road in the video!

It goes to show that you don’t need the most expensive equipment to create videos – the GoPro is more than enough for this type of shot.

iStock was also disappointing (January results) with just $351 after $468 last month and $513 the month before. Adobe Stock was also down at $477 compared to $556 in January. I did think the month was looking up when I got a $100 net sale on Alamy in the early part of the month, but it quickly petered out to end the month with $138 net. This included a 15c net sale – the first time I have seen anything that low on Alamy. This is the one that sold for $250 to generate my $100 sale:

My concept here was to illustrate that the first thing that someone might do in the morning after the alarms rings is to have a vape using Juul!

Some of the smaller agencies surprised me this month. 123RF ended the month with $93, Deposit Photos with $138 and even CanStock managed to reach $61! This was helped by a vertical shot of the canyon on Kauai which sold for $19!

Canva also did pretty well in February with a total of $125. I estimate the subscription earnings for this total so the real earnings are probably a bit more than that. I did start to upload a few more images to Canva earlier in February, but I can’t see them yet in my portfolio. It is so long since I uploaded there that I’m not at all sure how long they take to review new uploads.

Finally Pond5 was a disappointment with just $53 in sales, and EyeEM came in pretty badly with $39. All in all, a disappointing month all round!