Earnings from Stock Photography in June 2016

Another month, another disappointment with Shutterstock! After it picked up to $920 in May, we are back down at $748 for June. The lack of on-demand and the more expensive Extended and Single sales really is making a difference and it isn’t the reliable earner it once was, unfortunately. Lets hope they have some plans to pull up the earnings (unless the plan is to accept so many images that each contributor gets a smaller share of the pie)

However, Alamy did seem to show some good sales for me this last month, with a couple of $250 (gross) sales. I do submit via another agency to Alamy so I do share my revenue, but the end result for Alamy and Corbis was $340 in the month. iStock was sort of OK with an estimated $250. I really must get my act together and submit more of my images there – their keywording system always means that I de-prioritize them, but that isn’t really a sensible plan.

The best site in terms of potential continues to be Canva – $274 this month compared to $240 last month and $212 the month before. This month I did get some of the $3.50 RF sales as well as a lot of the 35c earnings.

So, overall, I ended up with $2419 for the month of June. Remembering that I have submitted very little in the past three or four months due to my house move, I can’t really complain!

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13 Responses

  1. Arletta says:

    Steve, SS is a huge disappointment not only for you… Many people say that month by month their earnings are falling down without hope for better… Sad, after what it could do before…
    About Alamy, do you know what is going on about the “personal use” licenses? There’s a serious problem for contributors, you could write here about it…

  2. admin says:

    Hi Arletta
    I hadn’t been following the Alamy discussion about personal use – I don’t submit there directly because I was fed up of the complex keywording they required, so I only use distributors to get there for new images.
    I’m a bit ambivalent about these sort of things – I sell my images on many different sites and so I have the same image on Alamy that is also on Canva, for instance. On Canva, someone can pay $1 to use an image once on a design they are making (and presumably print it out). On Alamy, the same image looks like it might be $10 for a similar purpose (although they can download the full resolution image which definitely puts the trust on the buyer). People pay $250 on Alamy for an image that is available on Shutterstock in many cases.
    My principle is that most big buyers have accounts and stay with their chosen agency. They are happy with the overall support they get and happy with the pricing. So I get what they are willing to pay on that agency.
    I think it is important not to get too worked up about these things – would be different if I was exclusive to Alamy, I’m sure, but in my approach you get the money where you can and hopefully avoid the ups and downs of any specific agency.
    Steve

    • Arletta says:

      On Alamy people also pay around $5 (for the full size!!!) which is much lower than some micros… Things are changing and it all doesn’t look promising for us, contributors I’m affraid…

  3. AlessandraRC says:

    Steve, you’ve mentioned Corbis, but haven’t they been engulfed by getty? I opened an account on Corbis, submitted a few images for some kind of a test and next thing they were in the process of being sold. I never heard back from them. Then, months later, an e-mail from getty saying that I could access my account there but I never did anything about it.

    Mind my asking which kinds of images sell on Alamy? People at the forums never really say. They are happy to tell anyone, whether upon request or not, what’s wrong with their portfolios, and to hypothesize, why some of us have no sales, but they never disclose which of their images have sold. I now have short of 400 images on Alamy, about 1/2 that on SS; no downloads on Alamy, about 30 on SS just last month (mostly the cheap license of course). Besides my usual stock that I upload everywhere, on Alamy I have about 200 RM images.

    I have done a search on Alamy measures and it seems as though customers are looking for other kinds of images, things related to the UK, celebrities, and lots and lots of sales of “boy” pictures, but the kinds of photos I have there seem not to be on demand on Alamy. That, coupled with their clumsy indexing system, are discouraging.

    Yes I also let my istock uploads to the last and hate myself when I am doing it. What is their problem? Why make us go through that?

    Total I have made 21.00 in stock lat month (not counting istock, they haven’t finished computing the partners sales yet)! I mad more two months ago (27.00) when I had a few less pictures!

    Thanks for sharing all that and for being so generous with information!

    • admin says:

      Hi Alessandra

      Yes, I got into Corbis through another small agency that I worked with – they supported me in Alamy and managed to get all their clients into Corbis. Now, of course, that is drying up and it looks like the images will be transferred across to Getty, but going forward everything new to Getty needs to be exclusive, so that will need some thinking about.

      The things that sell on Alamy seems to be all over the place to be honest. I think I get sales for text books as I do sell images of USA stores, I sold a number of shots of Equatorial Guinea this last month presumably for an article or a book, but then I do sell nice shots of the cherry blossoms in Washington occasionally. So it is one of those sites that you just need to support and see what happens. Of course, you can do what I do – submit to Zoonar and let them pass the images on to Alamy. They take a cut, but I sell 3 or 4 each month via them.

      The magic answer to all this is take photos, take some more, upload them and then repeat!

      Steve

  4. Margaret says:

    Hello Steve, I am amazed how much money you are making on selling stock. I have been trying hard to increase my sales for a few years and got stuck with the same level of income, no matter how hard I try. Shutterstock sales are going down, that’s true, but the amount you are still making there is beyond my reach anyway so you must be doing really good job to get such a comfortable income 🙂 Fotolia also is not that good as it used to be for me. Thank you for this great blog and sincere information, it is very helpful. Can I ask you if your symbiostok website gets any sales? I tried photoshelter for some time but with no success.
    All the best for you.

    • admin says:

      Hi Margaret

      It amazes me sometimes! But it is partly because I started a bit earlier than most and for some reason, earlier images still keep selling (perhaps they were downloaded more often in the early days and hence became more popular) and I also have been steadily working on this for 8 years now, so I have a lot of images for sale (8000+). I’ve been lucky with some nice cat images, and living near Washington DC gave me an opportunity to photograph scenes in their best light, but I don’t think I am a super photographer – just competent and careful with the keywording. I’ve found Fotolia/Adobe to be picking up recently, although it is hard to tell which is a good seller there. I have a friend with a lot of food and still life stuff that does really well on Fotolia and Canva, so perhaps that is one of their focus areas. The key thing is to keep up the quantity, keep up the quality, try to improve on what is there and keyword/describe carefully.

      Symbiostock (or any personal site in my view) is more of a vanity project than a money earner. That could change (possibly) but I don’t hold my breath. I can afford to support it like a child who has never left home!

      Steve

  5. Arletta says:

    Steve, I think you could invest a week and upload your images (8k, right?) at once to Alamy, and drink the top cream for the rest years of sales 😉 I see that you took this direction: upload to one agency and loose the 50% on each sale, forever, everywhere, everytime a sale is made. Seriously, it would take a week, maybe two for you to upload files there 😉 Even more, they plan to improve the upload system so you will be able to do it even faster in next months. So, what is better, to get 50% or 25% or less (Getty)? Something to consider for you 😉 Treat your time as investment, not a loss.

    Alessandra, on the Alamy forum you have the every month threads what was sold and found… You can see that every kind of image is sold and I confirm that. From fine art flowers, through food, plants, vegetables,… to editorial news images, fairs, shows, everything can sell… isolated objects as well as real shots…

  6. admin says:

    Hi Arletta
    Yes, you are right, I could do that, but I believe there are other factors in Alamy’s search criteria. I have around 4500 of my own images on Alamy, but rarely get sales ($9 in June), and then I have 2000 or so with the agency and almost all of my sales come via them. Perhaps they keyword them better, perhaps they have a better status on Alamy than my personal account – not sure, but it did make a big difference. They also got me into Corbis and now Getty, so it is hard to say that I would have been better on my own. I’ll watch out for their improvements though and may reconsider for future images as I have only been using Zoonar in recent months to get to Alamy.

    Steve

  7. Arletta says:

    With 4,5 K images you got only one sale? This is strange… You should get at least 4-10 sales easily… So I guess there’s a problem with keywords…

  8. AlessandraRC says:

    Arletta, from my understanding those threads about what sells pertain to stockimo only. But I will check again. Thanks.

    I can’t get too many images approved by Stockimo, my cell phone is old and sincerely, I have iphoneography. People who do Stockimo on a consisten basis are satisfied with sales, however.

    A.

  9. AlessandraRC says:

    Steve, thanks for your answers. It is possible that Zoonar has some agreement with Alamy that will expose your images more consistently. Something to think about. As Arletta said, it is possible that Alamy will streamline their indexing system. They have been announcing that they will do it.

  10. Craig Dingle says:

    Steve, thanks very much for your really interesting blog. As an exclusive on iStock it’s really interesting for me to read about your experience with other sites especially SS. Thank you.

I'm always interested in what you think - please let me know!