Earnings from Stock Photography Sept 2021

Another month and this time a real disappointment after two months where the Adobe Stock buyout offer resulted in some nice bumps to the income. Now we are seeing the new normal in the stock photography world and it really isn’t very pretty in my view. I still earned a pretty reasonable amount – $2502, but as the graph below shows, this is well below what I have seen in the same month for the past four years:

As you can see, this was the lowest September for 5 years and was between $500 and $900 less than those previous years. And this is after adding images month after month during that period. Just for completeness, here are my file counts at the main agencies:

So with 17,000 assets, this is the earnings potential…

What is also worrying, is how dependent my earnings are on a few big sales that you can’t really predict, shoot for, or even know what to expect. If I search for sales over $10 on Microstockr Pro, I end up with 26 images that sold for more than $10 in September for a total of $726. So if some of those hadn’t occurred, my monthly earnings would have been very poor. Some of my usual suspects were in this list – my cat had a $60 sale on Shutterstock, but the real star of the show was a $93 sale on Shutterstock for this drone image of a cellphone tower near my home:

This is what I mean about the randomness of these big sales. It is a nice enough image, has actually sold pretty well to reach $505 this year, but to rely on such massive sales shows just how variable this business can be. I also had a third great sale on SS with a pretty routine shot of the Supreme Court building in Washington DC:

This one sold for $62 to bring its total earnings to over $1200 now. Just to continue this “you just can’t plan for this” theme, I sold an image for the first time on any site – but it was on Alamy and earned $50 net, which is very nice. What was it – a boring picture of a US election form:

This was for the primary elections when you vote for the person from each party who then goes through into the final election. Just shows how accurate my prediction was with the placement of the pen! I also got a pretty nice sale on Canstock! For $30! This one has a bit of a story. I’ve been spending a lot of effort trying to boost my fine art print sales on Pinterest and I noticed that a pin of the image below had been saved to the account of someone with many boards of many subjects. I often have my pins saved by other artists, which doesn’t help very much. So a real potential buyer had saved this and within an hour or two, I saw the Canstock sale – from one of the distribution partners and so I assume it was a print. So perhaps there is life in Pinterest after all!

Among the agencies, Shutterstock again leads with $784 thanks to those big sales. Well behind now is Adobe Stock with $483 and iStock with $422 then a big drop down to Alamy with $241 and Canva with $138. Then we are in the minnows. EyeEM is worth a mention. I was about to stop uploading there, and then sold $107 in August and $97 in September, so it is interesting to see some life there!

The other real down for the month was zero sales on Society 6 and zero on Fine Art America. As I wrote last month, my social media efforts have pretty much done nothing and it really was brought home this month. I’ve doubled my portfolio size and got nothing in return…

Video sales were OK this month – just reaching $103 from 10 sales, but really that is nothing much to be honest.

So we are starting on our new normal state of lower earnings from more assets. I really hope this was just a bad month for Fine Art America – time will tell of course!

Just to give me something else to photograph, I did buy myself an Oculus Quest 2 virtual reality headset last week. Very smart, and again time will tell if I actually sell any images of it to justify its purchase!