Earnings from stock photography January 2013
The latest set of earnings from selling digital images shows a return to form! December was a little bit of a disappointment (although it is a month with a lot of holidays) and I ended that month with earnings of $1735. January started slow, but it picked up as the month progressed to give me a total of $2180 – not a best ever, but pretty close.
Growth in Earnings
As usual, Shutterstock was in the lead, followed by iStock, and then 123RF maintained its recent growth to come in third place with $218. Although my earnings per image are down because of a change in the commission structure, my overall earnings are showing some nice growth. The overall month was helped by solid earnings in quite a number of sites – nothing spectacular, or unusual – just steady sales.
I put a fair amount of effort this month to get more images online – adding almost 200 photos to most sites. I pulled back from iStock because of the “dirty dealing” in putting high resolution stock images on Google Drive with a payment of just $6 or $12 to the photographer. There is tremendous unease in the stock photography about this deal between Getty and Google, and so I am seriously considering my relationship with iStock. I’ll pull some images off that site tomorrow to show solidarity with the photographers whose images have been made worthless in this deal. Here are the current image totals on the main sites:
Images on line January 2013
Finally, this month, I worked up a different graph – I was keen to see how the percentage of total earnings has varied through the year, and so here is a chart that show which agencies provided the biggest percentage of earnings in each month during 2012. As you would expect, Shutterstock is the clear consistent winner, but it is interesting to see how much of my total earnings comes from the second and third tier sites:
Percent of Monthly Earnings
I’ve got more images to add now after a couple of trips in January – Hawaii and Rome! So I need to get busy to feed this voracious monster!
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I notice some discrepancies in your graphs. e.g. Graphic Leftovers appears in you image numbers graph but not in your earnings graph
Good point – it appears that I have an agency or two that is missing. I’ll see if I can sort it and replace the graph!
Wow! I never knew so much money could be made from online photos, I will definitely have to look at this more!
I am inspired by your article. I have had a passion for photography for many years and just recently decided to learn more about how to break into the stock photography business. Do you have any imperative recommendations for a newbie?
Thanks,
Mario
I would say “buy my book”, but my best piece of advice is to be very honest about your photographic abilities – can you create technically competent images. Secondly – are you willing to do the hard work of properly keywording those images. Many people like doing the photography bit but ignore the keywording. An image that no-one can find is not very useful!
Hello I wanted to build my own stock photography site on my own website. Have you ever tried to do something like that? I’m a web developer so I could do it – but I’m not sure if there are any programs or plugins around for this. Plus my own website server might have issues with bandwidth and storage sizes if I uploaded thousands of photos.
I wanted to do it my self because of the principle of it – that I may get less sales but at least when I do get the sale all the payment is mine.
Would value your view on this.
Email me direct if you like.
Alayna
I have done it. Complete waste of time! Search for Symbiostock on my site here and there will be lots of posts about the efforts to do this. Good luck if you attempt it!