Earnings from stock photography in February 2013
Not a great month! Sometimes this business can really knock you back, but I think the message is to just ignore the fall and get back on the bicycle! I did spend some time wondering if the work of uploading was worth the hassle, but am now back keywording and processing as before. So, what happened? Shutterstock was extremely slow in February – especially later in the month. I particularly noticed an almost complete lack of the Single downloads that can really make a difference to a month’s earnings. Just $17 worth in February compared to $160, $156, $119 in Nov, Dec and January. I did get $175 of Enhanced downloads, which was a bit below the norm, but the end result was that Shutterstock came in at just $700. iStock was pretty poor as well – a great month (January reporting in February) for the partner program of $105, but just $150 for the normal iStock sales. There are apparently volatile threads on their forum about falling income on that site. Alamy then gave me a present (!) – a refund of a $165 sale that had happened a couple of months back. Although I then had a number of smaller sales in February, this just brought me back to zero for the month. All in all, no site did particularly well, and so I ended the month at $1580. Of course, that isn’t bad, but after a run of $2000 months, it doesn’t feel great! As I said though, you need to get back on that bicycle and start pedaling again! Luckily I had a lot of files to finish, after trips to Hawaii and Rome in January and one to St Thomas in the Caribbean in February, so I can’t really say that this business is being bad to me personally. I’ve worked hard this past week to get all those images on-line – including finishing about 400 images that were stacked up on Alamy awaiting keywording, and so I’m hoping March will get me back on track.
Here are my graphs – not much change in files on-line in February as most of my images were uploaded in the final week. 100+ removed from iStock because of the Getty/iStock deal, so largely, my files were similar to the previous month. However, for the record, here are the end Feb totals:
Files online in Feb 2013
Growth in Earnings next – quite a break in the pattern, but perhaps March will bring it back!
Growth in Earnings
The monthly earnings chart for each stock site:
Earnings in February 2013
And, finally, a percentage of earnings from each site – useful to spot trends (let me know if you can spot them!!)
Percentage Earnings
Hello,
Thank you for sharing your stats. Is it possible to know how many files you have on Shutterstock, Istock and Alamy?
Thanks in advace,
I did include this – in the first graph in the post. I’ve had a real focus on uploading and keywording since the end of February, and so this morning the totals are: Shutterstock 3785, iStock 1909 and Alamy 4317.
Steve
Sorry, I didn’t notice those numbers on the chart. Thank you! And one more question – do you upload the same images on all these sites or it’s a different collection for different agencies?
Generally speaking, I upload all images to all sites using Lightburner to distribute them. Some of the sites are happy just to reject editorial images that they don’t support and so I just upload those along with the rest. Once a month I separate out my editorials from commercial images and upload the latter to sites that get really annoyed with seeing editorial shots mixed in with the others.
The difference in images online per site comes from restrictions on the number of uploads per week – eg iStock, rejections of my travel shots (eg Fotolia) and rejections of similars (eg Dreamstime). I think I have around 5500 shots in total if all were counted.
Steve
Thank you! Not everyone talks openly numbers – I appreciate a lot that you do. For sure it helps to get a general idea and to re-direct one’s efforts.
Hi Steve,
first thanks for sharing your stats with us.
Could you give a ball park number, how many of you photos at e.g. Shutterstock have produced the earning in e.g February. Just to understand if it is from 10, 100 or 1000 different photos.
Best Regards Ole
Good question! I don’t really have an answer that is a specific as your question, as I don’t record which images sell in any particular month – in fact, I don’t track sales per image at all. However, to give you some idea of the percentage of images that sell, I sorted my 3700 Shutterstock images by the sales per image and found that I have 600 images that have sold more than 10 times. Of course, new images that may get to that level wouldn’t be counted. I have 2600 images that have sold at least once on Shutterstock. As I’ve said before, if you could only take and upload the images that are going to become best sellers, these would be a much easier game!
Steve
Hi, what program do you use to upload your photos to so many sites?
Ps: great post, thank you!