Earnings from stock photography in March 2022

Shall we start with the good news or the bad? Well, the bad, perhaps! This was the lowest month since March 2016, but, having said that, it was quite a step up from last month to end with a total of $2775. Just to put this in perspective though, last March was $3315. There seems to be nothing that can be done about the steady decline in earnings. The overall graph looks like this:

What is interesting is how every month since September last year has been well lower than the same month a year earlier and it still sort of tracks the trends that I have been seeing year after year.

Just as a record for new readers, here is the file count for the agencies:

Very little difference from the previous month as I have not really spent much time uploading new stock files. I’ve been more involved in various attempts to boost my print sales these days. What you will notice on this one is that my 11,365 photos on Canstock are no more. I saw several sales on Canstock that were driven by print sales on one of their distributors and it didn’t make sense to compete with myself so obviously. I asked if I could block the distribution to that print partner, but I never really got an answer to that and so I asked them to close the account instead. I had already withdrawn most of the earnings so there was no real money left on the table.

What was also interesting is that even though I got to level 5 in the infamous Shutterstock wipeout of our earning percentage each year, this agency was totally demolished this month by Adobe Stock. Adobe $753, the other guys $493. You have got to hand it to Adobe – they are certainly doing some things right as far as the contributors are concerned.

I’ll cover some quarterly earnings later in this post, but here are some numbers for March. Coming in in third position was iStock, as usual, with $417, the Alamy with $261 followed by Canva with $184. All those agencies seem pretty stable these days, at least for me. Pond5 was next with $154. Stable comes nowhere near to the mark for Pond5, with my earnings in 2022 being $5.50, then $36 and finally $154. Each month is a lottery!

What also did well for me, was FineArtAmerica with about $100 and then Photo4Me with $40 or so. Society6 was a zero month for prints or other products.

Best Selling Images in March

Taking pole position in terms of the highest income for a single sale was Alamy with $67 for this photo of a sunset sky composited behind a cellphone tower:

This, and the original one, are turning out to be good earners for me with about $1100 in earnings so far. Almost enough to have paid for the drone I needed to take it!

Next was a very old image from around 2012 that sold for $58 on Pond5:

Alamy also came good with a $48 editorial sale of the study of President Washington:

Interesting to see the fan attached to his chair which he worked with two foot pedals to keep him cool when he was writing!

Adobe had a few nice sales as well, including this ceiling from the Galleria Borghese in Rome, which sold for $26.40. Of course, this might end up as a print somewhere or perhaps a jigsaw puzzle!

I had a nice selection of videos that sold in the month. Total sales of videos were $214, and here are the ones over $10

I was pleased with the one from Adobe at $34.65. Great video (if I might say so) of the ferris wheel at National Harbor outside Washington DC:

Quarterly Results

As we have now finished the first quarter of 2022, we can have a look at how things look when averaged out a bit:

This is getting complex now that it covers so many years, but the logic behind Excel calculating quarterly totals is complex and I don’t like to touch it! What it does show very nicely is how my earnings rose to a peak in 2020 and then have declined horribly with the latest quarter being the worst for a long time. You can also see the changing fortunes of the various agencies. The one in red is the one whose name we dare not speak…

And, to put more detail into this first quarter, here is an agency-by-agency total:

Just look (and be amazed) with how Adobe Stock has powered into the lead this year.

I hope that has given you some insight into how things have been going for me so far this year. On to the next project!