Earnings from Stock Photography October 2012

It has been a long time since I posted on the site – sorry about that! Just been very busy with travel and some personal issues, but I am back now, and back with a roar!

October turned out to be a great month for sales. The combination of the end of the summer vacations, start of planning for Christmas and early new year publications for designers, and perhaps the cumulative effect of adding more images on all of the main stock sites resulted in a record month of just over $2000 in revenue/earnings. This more than made up for a couple of so/so months in the late summer.

Almost everywhere I looked this month, there was some element of good news, so I’ll start with Shutterstock. This site really shone with a best month score of $826. My previous best in September had been $686, so you can see the growth in that site in one month. Several things helped – there were three enhanced downloads, $88 worth of single downloads and then a really steady performance day after day with 40 – 50 images being downloaded most working days. Although this is looking ahead a little, I finally got one of the rumored $70 single image sales in November, so this current month is off to a great start.

iStock didn’t get to a new record, but it was very steady at $326, including one of their extended licenses.

The next site in terms of earnings was a real surprise – 123RF came in with $226! My previous best had been $115, and this month I had a number of their print licenses and some very large file size downloads. However, the really big surprise here was that I noticed that my referral income ( which comes from people clicking on the various referral links on my site) grew to $66 in the month. I’ve no obvious way of finding out which contributor is having a fantastic month on 123RF, but I am very pleased that he/she found the site through me!

Then BigStockPhoto came up with some great large size sales for me, to end up with earnings of $120, again a record for that site with previous best around $50 or so.

The remaining sites were around their normal level – $90 from Dreamstime, $64 from Alamy, $60 from Deposit Photos and so on. One slight disappointment this month – our photographers cooperative site, only had a couple of sales to net $7.20 after last months great total of $29.

Here are the detailed graphs for October, and also a total per site for the year to date. I’ve earned $15275 so far in 2012, and so my target of $18K for the year looks to be a sure thing now. If you want to follow in my footsteps, don’t forget you can get a great guide to stock photography on my site!

Finally, I have continued to upload images to the main sites. This month it was mainly travel related – a trip to England including the Lake District and the Cotswolds, and some studio shots of sewing needles and tools. Here are the totals per site and the growth on three typical sites: