Earnings in April and May from stock photography
I’ve been a bit behind in posting new information – mainly because I’m in the process of moving to a different state and getting a house ready for sale is a very big task – you accumulate so much stuff over the years.
Anyway, photography took a back seat for the past month, although I did finally manage to process and keyword images that I took during a vacation in Cornwall in England and a short trip to Ocean City and uploaded those earlier this week – perhaps 150 images in total, split between RF and RM subjects (most Ocean City ones are RM as they have people and shops in them).
Earnings for the past couple of months have been disappointing in my mind – not because of the absolute dollar value ($2391 and $2279) – but more because the earnings are showing no signs of increasing even though I have more images online. May’s results were saved by almost $300 in net sales on Alamy – almost all the other sites were below their best and Shutterstock failed to reach $1000 for a second month this year. Overall, my earnings look like this:
Growth in Earnings from Stock Photography
Now look at the number of files I have online on a selection of agencies:
Growth of online photos for sale
Earnings have been pretty flat for 2 years almost, if I’m honest with myself, while I have added perhaps 1500 – 2000 new images to the stock agencies in that time. It is still a nice source of steady income, but I do wonder what the earnings would have been like if I hadn’t been continually adding new images to my portfolio!
Thanks for your sharing about earning report. I was impressive about the number of dollars that you got when selling stock photo on 24 different agencies. How did you manage to have enough fuel to upload huge amount of photos to long list of agencies, lol. The amount that you got recently for April and May, about 3K, is my target. Right now I am very far from this objective but I will try my best. I also notified that on Shutterstock, when you uploaded new image it often show up at the top of the SS search result and you have more chance to sell it. I am not sure the old image, for example the one you uploaded from 6 to year ago still sell good? I just joint SS from early this year so don’t have much experience.
Great job, and thanks for your sharing again. Good luck with your movement to new state.
Thanks for your kind comments! I’ve slowed down on uploads more recently – I use StockUploader, which is a great help for FTP’ing files to multiple agencies and I probably regularly upload to 10 these days. The other sites sit with the number of images frozen, but that is fine because those images continue to sell.
Shutterstock has been disappointing of late – I haven’t seen that bump for new images that you mention recently. It used to happen, but not any longer as far as I can see. The old images still sell though – a good image that eventually gets onto page 1 of their searches will continue to sell, no matter how old it is.
Good luck with your own uploads!
Steve