Earnings from Stock Photography June 2020
A great month for me, thanks to a number of factors that all came together in this one month. Of course, the issues with Shutterstock clouded the month and it would have been even better if I hadn’t suspended my account, but the final earnings count of $3235 exceeded all my expectations. Here is my normal graph:
As you can see, June 2020 is towering over the previous earnings for that month in earlier years, although I would be foolish to claim that this was the start of something good! So what helped push my earnings up this month?
Fine Art Sales
Without a doubt, a great sale on Fine Art America in early June gave me a good start with a $227 profit. I did sell a phone case later in the month for $5 but then I saw a sale on Photo4Me of my image of the sand dunes on Formby beach in England :
This sale netted about $32 and then a second sale of the same print came along for $26. This is now the eighth time this particular image has sold on that site. I guess there must be a lot of people in Formby who like a print of the beach on their wall!
Finally, I had some more smaller sales on Society6 – 4 in total this month, that brought in $28. So Fine art stuff is definitely worth persevering with!
EyeEM comes from nowhere
I’ve gotten used to small payments from EyeEM over the months – mainly coming from their partnership with Getty. I understand that Getty has been deleting accounts (from EyeEM) when there is a lot of duplication of images also uploaded via iStock, so I guess there is a chance that this may end, but I was very pleasantly surprised to see a couple of sales from the EyeEM market itself. The first one was called a Full License for $140 net:
This is, of course, one of my best selling landscapes, but great to see a big sale on EyeEM. But then I got a web license for $36 for a simple shot of a record player:
I believe this was actually via the Adobe partnership they have – which is a first for me. Overall, EyeEM came in with $253 for the month.
Pond5 comes to life
After quite a lull ($34 in May and $17 the month before), Pond5 came roaring back to life with total sales of $263. The largest sale there was for $75 for this simple video:
I also got $30 for this composite video taken against my green screen:
Some fireworks and opioid videos rounded out the month on Pond5, although I did sell two photos including one for $22 for this shot of an old dog in a doggy diaper:
Stock Agencies fill in the rest
Among the stock agencies, Canva, of course is going to be another good month with their offer to pay double the March earnings so I have booked $300 for that. iStock was pretty good with $428 and Adobe stock with $464. Alamy was not bad with sales of $136 and Dreamstime really surprised me with sales of $103. Normally I expect $30 to $40, but I got $31 from 15 downloads of this artistic shot:
But what about Shutterstock?
As I have talked about before, I decided to disable my portfolio in mid June in protest about the change in the contributor earnings schedule even though I didn’t think that it would make a tremendous difference to me personally. Before that, I had seen a great run of quite expensive downloads, capped by this one at $119:
I also had 3 photos that earned over $30 and two videos that earned $80 in total. So my earnings per download (which everyone on the MSG thinks is the way to judge the new earnings scheme) jumped from an average of $74 in the first months of the year to $0.91 in June. I did re-enable my portfolio on June 24 after I first thought that a couple of the really big contributors had closed their accounts, but of course, they came back shortly afterwards. I think the team organizing the boycott did a great job, but, to be honest, it will go nowhere because so few contributors actually supported (or knew about) them. So the choice is to leave Shutterstock or to continue to earn money from them. After all the effort I put into that site, I decided on the latter course, but everyone needs to make their own judgement. For what it is worth, after 460 subs sales, my average price is $0.25 (a 34% drop) but my average On demand image is earning $3.23 – a 13% increase on the old scheme. I know many of you are below level 5 and so I really can see how bad this must be.
At the end of the month, I got $680 from Shutterstock.
The quarter has ended…
I normally do a report on the quarter which ended at the end of June. So that is next on my “to do” list and I’ll publish that shortly. In the meantime, good luck with your own portfolios!
I swear I will buy a cat. With my earning only cats can save me.
I will also downgrade my camera to this to cut down production expenses https://www.amazon.ca/Holga-144120-120N-Plastic-Camera/dp/B000AL8JKW
I think you might do better with two cats! Just keep them warm!
Ugh, I have to blow off some steam. Maybe complaining helps :D. I have LOT of sales, but lately the highest I get is 20 cents and that is a big thing( most 0.10, 0,11). So most days I am over 50% down( no SOD/OD and so one, maybe an algorithm thing). Cant`help seeing how I am losing money. And the mobile app keeps saying: Congratulation, fist sale…0,10c…mmm thanks..keep on rubbing that salt :P. There is probably also the vacation mode in Europe that explains only the small subs. And oh how I hate the free photo sites. They are so ruining the stock business for everyone. There is NO FREE exposure, no one cares as long as the corporate sites can use your free photos…NO ONE cares about your NAME as long as picture is free. Keep that mind…NOBODY CARES ABOUT YOUR NAME. When will they get it… . At least get paid for it.
Thoughts?
Hi – I don’t know what to say! I hope you feel a bit better getting this off your chest. That Shutterstock change was a massive kick in the teeth for contributors with smaller portfolios and fewer sales. I am seeing the impact on subscription sales (although to be honest the average payment per sub has been rising for me to 26c now. I don’t know if they are selling fewer very large packages or what is driving the change, but it is nice to see. I’m also getting occasional enhanced and single sales. But the key factor for me is that the other agencies I have been contributing to over the years are not impacted by this and so Shutterstock is becoming a smaller part of the overall pie. I’m still thinking of new ideas and getting them uploaded – not sure what else you can do unless you decide to try a different avenue for income. Totally agree about the free sites – those are the main drivers behind our falling income, without a doubt, and the contributors to them are so stupid in my mind. But we aren’t going to change the world so we must either adapt or go and do something else.
Steve
Thank you. I guess I needed listening :D. I uninstalled SS app and spirits are a bit higher( earnings still down :P). I am starting to realize, that I can`t put all my “eggs” in SS gallery. So I wanted to ask if 123RF and Bigstock are also microstock? I mean like AS and SS? So you can upload same pictures there as you have other agencies?
Hi. It is hard to find a stock agency that isn’t microstock although that name doesn’t really mean anything. All it originally meant was that the agency sold images for much less via an online portal than the traditional agencies of the time which offered a much more hands on support approach. What you are really asking is whether there are other agencies that are non-exclusive in terms of the images you upload. With a non-exclusive licensing agreement between you and the agency, you can upload the same images to other agencies. And, as you ask, 123RF and Bigstock (owned by SS, by the way) are non-exclusive agencies. All the agencies I upload to and report on via my posts are non-exclusive and as you will have seen, they generate small amounts individually, but a reasonable percentage of my monthly earnings collectively.
Steve
Okay, thank you for your answer :). I suspected that but was not sure.
Hi Steven, thanks for your great articles. I was wondering, do you price pics and footage yourself on Pond5? Or do you leave the pricing to them? Because if you look at the site for reference you see that similar pictures have completely different prices and I really don’t get it. Thank you.
Hi Luke. It is a frustrating process to be honest. I manually price them (you can do that in Stock Submitter) and I think I choose something like $149 for 4K and $75 for HD. And then that seems to stick for a while, but when I had a sale recently I noticed that the HD size was priced at $55 and the 4K version at $125. So it seems that although you set them manually, something happens from time to time to change that. So I do go from time to time and reprice them all again. I think the $150 price for a 4K is about right these days. I set the pictures to $20 but don’t sell a lot at Pond5.
Hi Steven, thanks for your help. The price change you are seeing might be related to the option (under account, preferences) “optimized pricing” which gives Pond5 the opportunity to change the price of your contents to take advantage of trends etc.
Have you ever used Wirestock and Blackbox? What are your thoughts?
Lastly I am using Xpiks for keywords and upload, do you think Stock-submitter and Microstock Plus are a better option / worth paying a fee?
Many thanks.
Hi Luke – I didn’t have that checked (didn’t know it existed!), but I have now checked it to see what happens. As I’ve written before, I’m more interested in overall income rather than individual sales, so I might as well try my luck with their pricing! I haven’t used Wirestock or Blackbox – I don’t think their keywording is that great (from what people tell me) and although I can see the potential for a higher return on Shutterstock, I don’t really like having my images under the control of someone else. And that fits in with your other question – what I really like about Stock Submitter (and M+) is that it is a completely automated process all the way through submission at many sites. I don’t have to visit the sites at all to complete the upload, which saves a lot of time with sites like Alamy and their supertags. I don’t think Xpiks does that submission part. So I do think it is worth paying if you are uploading in bulk. You can try it for free up to a certain number of submissions.
Steve