Earnings from Stock Photography in October 2023
Month’s zip by and it is time for another review of earnings from Photography. I’ve been away on a cruise – this time down the Mississippi and I have many images to process, keyword and upload. 83 have been added so far as I wanted to perhaps catch the interest in the low water levels on that river, but so far, no takers!
Back to the month of October. It turned out to be reasonable, although my sales of my prints have dropped through the floor – absolutely nothing on Fine Art America and nothing on Pictorem! Either I have annoyed the owners of those sites, or, more likely, my time away from social media has resulted in less visibility of my work. I hope November will improve my sales!
My total income from photography came in at $2825 which is “sort of” similar to previous years. Here is the graph:
And here are the file/asset counts that generated this income:
There was an unusual event in October – the rebirth of EyeEM. Over the month I saw all the reports of the earnings they had been gathering from Getty and other sites while they were incommunicado, and the total came to $237 for me. I started amortizing these one-off payments in my spreadsheets and so the total of $2825 includes that full payment, but I actually split it into each month in 2023 to create a graph that I introduced last month – my true monthly earnings just from stock photography:
October came in at $2653 under this measure and once again shows how stable my stock income has become over the years. Yes, I keeping adding more assets, but the income does seem to continue to come in.
Earnings from the stock agencies
The highest earning agency, once again, was Adobe with $644. SS was next with $559, which is better than it has been recently, and iStock was third with $413. I have been neglecting uploading to iStock for quite some time, as their controlled vocabulary is quite a pain to work with, but I have been trying to add more recently. I managed to add 80 images in October to that agency. Alamy was next with $281 thanks to the added income from the DACS scheme in the UK and finally Canva was a bit lower than usual at $225.
I rarely talk about the smaller agencies but just out of interest, I noticed that I earned $460 from all of them in total – not bad for these smaller players.
Best Selling Images
I always like to look at the sales for assets greater than $10 as it is those larger sales that make all the difference to a month. This time, there were 13 images/videos that earned more than $10 (11 images and 2 videos) for a total of $370. The best one by far was this photo of Tunnels Beach on Kauai:
This one sold for $87.50 on Shutterstock.
On Alamy, I sold this photo of some abandoned machinery on the beach in Alaska. This sold for $38
This one of the New River Gorge in West Virginia sold for $40 on Getty/iStock:
And this one sold for $20 on Shutterstock:
This was one of those opportunistic shots. I was staying in Alexandria and the evening was quite warm and a chance of a sunset and so I hiked about 3 miles to the center of the bridge across the Potomac River and took a series of images of the city of Alexandria. They have turned out to be great sellers both on stock agencies and also as fine art shots. So, a walk with great benefits!
Conclusions
Nothing really fantastic or out of the ordinary this month – just another solid set of earnings. Now if only I could get those print sales going again. I think I need to re-read my book on selling fine art prints!
