Earnings from stock photography in January 2022
A new month, a new year and a new low in terms of earnings from stock photography in January. As the month went on, I knew this was not going to be great, as I just did not seem to break a steady but very slow daily pattern. Of course, the horrible reduction in Shutterstock earning percentage on January 1 did not help at all, although I managed to climb to Level 4 by January 20, which still meant I had three weeks at the lower levels. So what was the outcome for the month? Just the lowest month since January 2013 – 9 years ago – at $1977. My graph tells the story:
January 2022 has certainly hit a new low! This is on a portfolio of over 17,000 images:
When I dug a bit deeper into the details to see just why this was such a low flying month, the main thing that jumped out at me was the lack of “large” sales – either from photos or from videos. In fact, I had just 4 images that sold for more than $10 and they earned a total of $78 between them.
Strange to see Canstock in that list! In fact, I made $22 from that agency for the whole month and one image was $17 of that. I am pretty sure this was a license for a print and so I probably lost a sale on Fine Art America in making this one sale on Canstock! Of course, I only have myself to blame for that, and you can’t be annoyed with someone for shopping around!
I have kept a record of how much large >$10 sales have impact monthly earnings and so I have a graph of that for you!
Normally these large sales add between $300 to $700 to the monthly income and I am not including individual Fine Art America sales in that. These are just larger than normal sales from the usual stock agencies that are tracked by Microstockr Pro. Now there is a bright side to all this! The number of downloads on Shutterstock were not down – in fact, they were higher than normal at 866. The average is probably more around 750 to 850. So, unless they have done something to discourage buyers from going for the more expensive licenses, we can probably assume that these larger sales come at random and so I should get something closer to the normal quantity in February and that this was just a real outlier of a month. Or is that wishful thinking?? Time will tell!
So, with all this, each agency had its own struggles. SS was as low as it has been for 10 years with just $374! iStock was down as well (and this is December sales really) with $349 compared to well over $400 in previous months. Alamy was rubbish with just $146 but there was a bright spot – Adobe ended the month with $551 – well above December’s $419 and above the normal level for that agency. And that is just with regular downloads – no high value sales as we have seen. Canva was also higher than normal (again, December numbers paid in January) with $174 compared to a normal $140 or so. The rest hardly seem worth talking about!
Video was pretty poor as well, with 8 sales for $42, almost all from Shutterstock. Nothing from Pond5 – just two photo sales in the month for a massive $5.50.
Finally, after all my effort at building both my portfolio and my social media presence for my “Fine Art” stuff on FAA, I just sold two things and they were small and pretty unimportant to earn a grand total of $9.30. What is the world coming to?
I am the last one to give up at this sort of thing and so I am currently on week 3 of a twelve-week course on building a following of art buyers who really like my work and are willing to pay for it. David duChemin runs it and it is far from inexpensive, but we will see if it pays off in 2022. Until we see the results of that, I’ll keep my fingers crossed that this was just a bad month and not the start of a bad year!
Same here. not as crappy as I expected it to be, but this is due to good performance from AS and IS. SS bombed completely.
In the end of December last year I had about 10 sales on Alamy for 0.15c each! And finally a sale in FAA but they took 20% because it came through an add, I earned 18 bucks
Yes, I had a lot of those little Alamy sales – from China I believe. And that FAA sale almost paid your annual fee! I saw that you were planning to give up your account there – it’s a shame that more didn’t sell. You have some great images there.
Thank you, Steve. As you, I have .poked for instruction on how to build a followers base for my fine art, and I have concluded that FAA is not a good place for that. That’s because we don’t get customers’ information. Our customers there are in fact faa customers. I’m slowly going to move my “ stuff” out of there and onto either my website or a print on demand service that shares customer info with me. I didn’t want to get into those details in the forum, but sales on faa are sporadic and random at best.
You are absolutely right about the lack of linkage to the customers. That is a key point so far in my marketing course. I’m sort of moving towards creating a much more focused portfolio on Backyard Image and try to collect real customer emails there to talk about my absolute favorite images and also try to rework them to make them more enticing and then leave a much broader range of images for people to find on FAA. I can then use FAA to fulfil the orders for my “select” customers that I have a direct relationship with.
That sounds like a good plan. There is nothing wrong with leaving images at FAA, but centering your marketing strategy on your portfolio there will bring more customers to FAA and not necessarily to you. As for P.O.D. fulfillment, consider Finer Works. Their print services are awesome, with various papers and products
to chose from.
500PX been growing for me surprisingly so much that I actually just became a member yesterday. Had three market freeze request which gave me $3300 that was a shocker but decided to cut a few agencies as well.
That’s interesting, indeed! Congrats! I will have to go to the site to see if I have any earnings!
Thanks Steven, I’ve resorted to posting exclusives which carries a higher percentage yes you will see 1c etc but when a biggie hits it’s decent. I only have 130 images up but will work to increase it.
Interesting indeed. What sort of images have you had market freeze requests? People images or places?
All three had people in it.