Earnings from stock photography July 2020

It is always interesting to see how my earnings compare month by month and also with the same month in the previous years and this month was no exception. I didn’t expect to get anything like the June results, because I had some great one-off events that month that I didn’t expect to be repeated, but even so, July came in pretty solidly with $2895. That compares with the $3245 in June and $2950 in July 2019, pre-Covid! As I have said a few times recently, this has turned from a business where adding assets meant an increase in earnings – now adding assets maintains your earnings (at least for me). Here is my usual graph although I have removed a couple of the earlier years as it was getting too busy:

As you can see from the general heights of the columns, there is some seasonality in my earnings – the summer from May through August tends to be lower than the rest of the year, although this is not a massive trend for me. I do have season specific shots (such as Xmas trees), but they don’t form the majority of my portfolio and so I do get bumps in sales coming up to those periods, but it is not a major thing for me.

I’ve been submitting far fewer images and videos recently – travel has been markedly reduced as I am sure you are all aware and so I have just been creating images in my studio. Here is the trend of images being uploaded each month:

I track the increase in assets on Shutterstock for this graph and they have become quite fierce lately on rejecting similars, so I probably have a few more being accepted on other agencies. But this gives you a good idea of what I have been up to. That gives me the following totals per agency:

I did remove my portfolio from Shutterstock to support the action against the recent changes in contributor payouts, but after a time I decided that the agency was not going to change – too many major contributors did not remove their assets and so you need to decide if you are still going to contribute to Shutterstock or boycott it altogether. I’m not sure that the half way house of keeping some assets there but not adding new ones hurts anyone except the contributor. I’ve also been maintaining a record of the average price I’m being paid for subscriptions and on-demand images as a Level 5 image contributor. After 1259 subscriptions through June and July I have ended up with an average price paid of $0.26 – ie a 31% reduction on the old payout of $0.38. The ODs are up to $3.18 over 92 sales compared to $2.85. I’m less convinced of the accuracy of that latter area because there are occasional ODs that are priced lower. I don’t recall many of those in the past. Overall, my earnings per download has not actually changed all that much over the past 18 months. This chart is for images only and the horizontal line is the excel calculated trend line:

Of course, this is at the Tier 5 level. I know that many (most) contributors are hit much more harshly than this, especially if they are relatively new to stock photography.

Back to July results – the biggest earner as usual was Shutterstock with $760 compared to $680 last month and $745 the month before. Shutterstock earnings are heavily influenced by higher priced downloads (and videos) and I had an $83 sale of this image early in the month:

Nothing very startling about this I don’t even think it is anything more than a cropped single image, but I’ll take the sale! I also sold one of the first images I ever uploaded to stock agencies back in 2008:

This sold for $34 this month to bring its total sales to around $650 or so. Adobe Stock ended up nicely at $582 – not the best I have done on that agency, but it is performing well. I don’t tend to get many large photo sales on Adobe – in fact the highest priced image sale was $12.80. But I did get three videos of the ocean off a cruise ship stern. Adobe tends to succeed with many downloads with an average rate of just less than $1.

iStock did OK again with $449 and then Canva is still paying the “double the March earnings” with $298. I’ll be sorry to see that go as I only earned $177 in “real earnings” in June. Alamy was not bad with $150 or so, but EyeEM dropped from an out of this world payout of $253 in June to just $22 in July. That $253 was mainly the result of some very large sales from the EyeEM account itself rather than from Getty.

I did manage to sell $35 of stuff on Society 6 – a few prints, mugs and so on, but it does tend to be a restricted set of images that have caught on. I also sold two prints on Photo4Me – as usual the beach scene from Formby in northern England was one of them and a waterfall in Wales made the second print. That site only seems to work for images from the UK – so unless you have those, it is probably not worth bothering with.

My Coronavirus themed shots are continuing to sell, but in much smaller numbers. Here is the graph:

I only wish that graph represented the number of active cases in the USA – unfortunately that is far from the reality.

Hope you are all keeping safe and still coming up with ideas. I’m very tempted to try my hand at book covers after the fantastic job that Alex has been doing in that field!