Earnings from Stock Photography Jan 2021

This month started very slowly and I thought this could be one of my worst months, but it ended with a bit of a bang and so crept into the middle of the road category of earnings! The bang was a sale of a 6 foot (almost 2m) wide print on wood of this panorama from Hanalei on the lovely island of Kauai:

I received the email late on the 31 January and so it really made a difference to my earnings this month as it gave me a profit of $302 after a 20% discount. I have recently been doing a lot of internal and external promotions on the Fine Art America site, but, of course, no way to tell if that made a difference! Still, it made my January!

Overall, that gave me total earnings of $2636 for the month compared to $2895 last January and $3125 in December. The historical picture looks like this:

And my file counts were very similar to last month with a growth of about 35 images:

Agency Performance

All the agencies seemed to be slow this month. The agency whose name we dare not mention (!) had a big drop in earnings to below $500 although it still managed to be in first place. Adobe Stock was down to $427 from $575 in December and even iStock, which has been strong recently, reported December sales of $370 compared with $504 the month before. Dreamstime was maybe the only one that grew, this time to $126 although I did well with Alamy this month with net sales of $162 for 12 downloads. Canva paid out another $298 which is really making a massive difference to each month’s returns. It is amazing to see an agency actually pay out more these days to contributors! I wish I had more of the sort of images that their designers seem to like, but that is why I submit to so many agencies – you never know what will catch on.

Sales of video stock assets?

In a word – dreadful! I sold just 3 videos for $21.96! And one of those was on Pond5 for $18.99 with my popular shot of the bow of a cruise ship sailing into stormy waters. I hope this shows some growth in the coming months!

Higher Priced image sales?

A few of these made a difference this month although there was nothing over $50. SS surprised me with a sale of this:

for $37.50 early in the month. This is one of my composites – a sign that I took back in 2008 put up against the front of my current home. This allows me to sell it as commercial although, to be honest, it is hard that this house is particularly identifiable. The same day, I sold this image of a small tree growing in the middle of some rocks for $30 on SS:

And that same day, I sold this on SS for $25:

The point of showing these is to just confirm that the wider the range of your images, the more the chance that something will sell. I would guess that the latter one was maybe used for an article about cruise ships, the first about evictions and housing issues. The middle one – perhaps global warming – who knows, but at least one of my images was there to meet the needs of the buyer that day. Lucky, yes, but without the image being there, the luck would not have paid off.

There isn’t much else to say about January. Perhaps Good Riddance might be the words to end with!