Earnings from Stock Photography in October 2021
October is supposed to be the start of the winter higher sales period after the summer slump, but, for me at least, that didn’t happen this month! Last October was a career best with $3900! I didn’t expect that, but equally, I didn’t expect a career low for October of $2457. As this graph shows, this is far lower than any of the previous 5 years and is either showing that the industry is in a terminal decline, or my portfolio is!
This is on a portfolio of 17000 images and videos (mainly photos):
As you can see from the earnings graph, everything was pretty much aligned with the previous month – no agencies did really badly, but then no agencies did really well. As I mentioned last month, it seems to be these occasional big sales that make a difference in a month as the steady drip of 10c earnings on an image at Shutterstock no longer move the needle very much.
There were no buyouts of images this month either from Adobe, which also helped depress the earnings.
So, in terms of agencies, SS was down a bit on last month with $645, iStock was up a bit with $468 and Adobe was also up with $505. Then the rot starts to set in!
I had 24 sales at Alamy, which, in the good old days would have been a sizable income. These days – $80. What is unusual, is that the same file sold multiple times for the same amount on the same day, on three separate occasions, but no sign of refunds as yet. I don’t know why that would be unless it was some sort of cheap restrictive license and they needed several copies. These days, it is hardly worth investigating!
Canva is steady for me at around $140 a month – $144 this month. Nothing much I can do to influence that. EyeEM hadn’t reported sales at this time of writing and so I estimated $50 for the total for the month. A surprise for me was Pond5 which came in with sales of $131 – almost all video sales. My very old HD videos of the fireworks over Washington DC sold four times, which is unusual for October, and also one of the ocean over the bow of a cruise ship also sold. Altogether, I earned $205 from videos this month, which is higher than normal, including this nice one of unboxing a case of wine. Who knew that you could spend money on wine and earn money from it as well!
This sold on Shutterstock for $20.
My video sales are a long way down from the glory days as this graph shows:
So, were there any bright spots? Not that many to be honest. The highest single sale was this one on SS, which sold for $56:
Then this one sold twice on SS for $38 and $12:
But really not very much else to report there.
On the Fine Art front, I am still working hard at social media and the start of some progress in sales. I did sell three things on Fine Art America in October, a small print, a jigsaw puzzle and two mugs. Total profit was $26. Not great, but a step in the right direction. I noticed that I sold another print this morning as well, so perhaps my efforts are starting to pay off a little.
Hopefully more, and more enthusiastic reporting of earnings in November! I have added more images in October, including more of mobile phone towers using my drone (as the thumbnail for this post shows) and perhaps I will get a boost from those!
