Earnings from Stock Photography – latest stats

First a word about February – although this is a short month, it didn’t turn out too badly for me, my Stock Photographer’s Lament notwithstanding! Total earnings ended at $2511 and some of the Zoonar and iStock earnings have still to appear. Bright points of the month were with iStock, where I had five Extended licenses bought on the same day – all variants of this shoot:

Five extended licenses from this shoot

Fotolia/Adobe is continuing to grow – I reached $192 from that site in February, and Canva is very reliable – $191 in February. Shutterstock as usual disappoints, with just $828.

This prompted me to revisit a chart I created a couple of years back when I calculated the earnings per online image from the main sites. To avoid lots of work, I lumped quite a number of sites into the “Others” category and so some of my current good sites such as Canva are in that category. You could argue that this sort of calculation should use the total number of files I have available for upload, but because I don’t upload the same images to all sites, it is probably a bit more representative to look at how many images are on each individual site in calculating it. I do this each quarter, and so the graph below runs from 2011 through to the end of 2015:

What is interesting/worrying about this graph is how my earnings per image are falling. I sort of knew that because I keep uploading images and my earnings have leveled off, but it is striking to see it in a graph. I have gone from the good old days (Make Stock Photography Great Again…) of 2012 when I earned $0.72 per image to my current results of $0.41 per image per month. Either I am uploading rubbish or this is getting harder and you need to keep on that treadmill just to stand still!

To some extent, my type of photography produces images that may not be used very often, but then I would have taken those shots anyway as I travel around, and so it is important to not get too depressed about this, but more work doesn’t necessarily result in more dollars.

Within the sites, Shutterstock dropped from $0.22 to $0.16, iStock from $0.18 to $0.06, and Fotolia from $0.05 to $0.03 over the 2012 – 2015 period. I can understand the Fotolia result – they used to reject a lot of my images and so I never had many on the site. They area less critical now (or accept more travel shots) and so my earnings are growing but earnings per image are falling.

I think stock photographers who focus on specific studio shots will expect and get more per image – travel photography has different criteria I think, but I still enjoy it!