Earnings from stock photography – July 2021

Beginning of another month – these seem to come round so quickly! July 2021 was OK in terms of total earnings, but looking below the hood, things don’t look so good! Total income ended with $2933 which is in line with July earnings in the past couple of years. So no growth, but no decrease in that top line number. However, I “sold” 100 images to Adobe Stock for their free catalog and received $500 for those pretty low earning images. To simplify my life, I added those into the July earnings total and so without them, I would only have earned $2433 – the worst July since 2017. So this is continuing the summer of despair – lower earnings despite an increase in activity. I know, I shouldn’t complain, but this is a real sign of the times in this industry.

Here is my usual graph of earnings:

If I don’t add this next chart, I always get a question about the size of my portfolio to support these earnings. I added about 100 images over the end of June numbers to give this:

Looking at the daily earnings during July, you can see the reason for the relatively poor outcome:

This chart, from Microstockr Pro, doesn’t include Getty/iStock and doesn’t include the bonus $500 from Adobe Stock. You can see the average levels of sales during the middle of the month. Some of these were just around the $40 to $50 a day level. If the month had continued at that sort of level, it would have been pretty poor indeed. What saved the month were those few days with much larger single download that really boosted the overall earnings. For instance, the tallest bar on the right is $176 and that final week of the month really made a difference for me. So what drove those peaks – some sales that you can’t rely on, but are very, very welcome when they come along. One of the reasons I think my portfolio does OK on these sites is that it is now a diverse mix of some pretty nice landscape/travel images and a whole series of studio type product or concept shots. So I sold this generic cellphone tower image (actually this one and the original that had a more boring sky) a total of 33 times for $49:

Then this one (and similar ones illustrating the new child benefit payments that are being issued in the USA – and which I wrote about several months ago in my premium section) sold 44 times for $39 in the month:

And then the changing an air filter series in an HVAC system sold 44 times for $25:

So all these different concept type images give me a base line of earnings that tends to come in month after month. Layered on top of that are those occasional higher value sales that really help total earnings:

This image, which I took and uploaded about 12 years ago, has never sold (at all!) until this month it sold on Shutterstock for $50.75. This this one from Kauai that had earned $7 in its 6 years online, sold on Adobe for $26.40. Finally, I sold 4 images of Kauai on Dreamstime for $14.30 each:

I think these were sold as Extended licenses for Prints, which I think costs the buyer about $50. What is slightly concerning here is that I had been communicating with someone who found me on Fine Art America and was going to buy some prints of Kauai to remind her of vacations there. I have a suspicion that she may have searched my images more widely and found their stock photo cousins and bought the files rather than the prints on FAA. I may be wrong (and I’m really grateful she bought a print extended license if she did this), but this discussion above shows two or three things. First, the danger of assuming that an image has never sold and so can be put into a free portfolio, second the danger of having the same image on both Print on demand sites and stock photo agencies, and third – you can never forecast what is going to happen!

Even with this, I’m not sure I would do anything different. This image from the New River Gorge national park as sold occasionally as a print, but has earned $1200 as stock downloads, including $48 this month in 16 downloads. So keeping it just as a Print on demand image would not have resulted in anything like those earnings.

So, I will continue as I am – putting my images everywhere in the hope of meeting a need for either a print or a download. I will also continue to take the $5 from Adobe if they select more images in the future. I feel I am just milking this portfolio rather than treating it like a lifetime asset, but with the way the industry is changing, that is probably the best plan for me.

So what did the agencies do this month – of course Adobe was first with $1027, SS next with $582 and Getty next with $475. Then a big drop down to Alamy with $203 and then on to the minnows (which collectively do OK, I must admit!). Videos were rubbish at around $50….

No sales on Fine Art America this past month. My adventures with social media are not paying dividends so far and I continue to work backwards through my portfolio adding new images over there. I will do this for the rest of 2021 and then see where I am!

Until next month – happy shooting…