Earnings in July 2016 and analysis of trends in Stock Photography

Firstly – what a poor month! I just scraped past the $2000 mark, thanks to Canva ($247) and Fotolia ($274). Alamy and Corbis were OK with $197, iStock at $248 and 123RF came in nicely at $154. But Shutterstock really slumped down to $536. I think I need to go back to 2012 before I find a month as bad as that. That make me think about my graphs of earnings per online image to see how things are looking and what the trends are as far as my stock photography is concerned. Of course, my results don’t necessarily apply to anyone else’s portfolio and I am sure that what I am seeing doesn’t translate into the earnings of the agencies themselves, so take my results as you find them.

First my earnings for the month:

Earnings from stock photography in July 2016

It is perhaps good to not rely as much on one agency, but it is hard on the overall earnings when the drop happens pretty quickly!

Then the history:

History of earnings from stock photography

Of course, this could be because I am lazy and not adding new images, but no:

Growth in files on stock agencies

Zoonar is a case where I upload both editorial and commercial photos and so represents my overall portfolio. Shutterstock and iStock get commercial shots.

My portfolio on the different agencies (and I don’t track them all, Canva in particular):

Images per microstock agency

Now some more interesting trends. I keep a record of how many images I have on different agencies and I have the earnings each month so I can calculate the earnings per image that has been uploaded and accepted to each agency. These charts show the history of that and show whether I should expect to see my revenue grow as I add more images to that particular agency. The bright light in this is undoubtedly Fotolia/Adobe Stock. Whatever they are doing (and I see a lot of integration into Photoshop), I hope they continue doing it!

Earnings per image on Adobe Stock

The worst performer is iStock. Whatever they are doing, I hope they stop and try something else!

Earnings per image on Istockphoto

123RF is holding its own:

Earnings per image on 123RF

And Shutterstock is really heading downhill for me, this year in particular:

Earnings per image on Shutterstock

This seems to be partly because I am earning less per download, but both the downloads per image and the total number of downloads has been going down since mid 2014 – perhaps because their library is now so huge that my images are a tiny tiny fraction of that. So if I used to be on the first page of search results, now I’m on the second and don’t get the sale:

Downloads on Shutterstock

So the bright future seems to be with Canva and Adobe Stock – the others sites, not so much! I hope you had a better month than me!

 

 

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4 Responses

  1. Chris says:

    Very interesting. Shutterstock has been very good to me lately though last month was slightly down as expected. Im earnign around $1000 a month from about 1600 images. $700 of this is SS. iStock is maybe another $100 wit the other 10 libraries accounting for just $200. Very skewed. Just cant get others off the ground which is dangerous.

    • admin says:

      You’ve got some great shots on your website! I often think that I could earn the same money with far fewer images, but of course it is always hard to know which ones the buyers will like!

  2. AlessandraRC says:

    If you go to forums you know how much people are complaining about July. Me and my couple of a hundred pictures portfolio did very poorly as well, wasn’t for my first sale on Alamy, about which I am very happy, I would have earned a total of 16.00 U$ this july.

    For those just starting, it is almost not worth it uploading anywhere else other than SS, Istock, Fotolia and perhaps Alamy. DM, CanStock, 123, are a joke for beginners. We ain’t got a chance there. It seems like their algorithms strongly favor images that have sold before and it is very difficult, if it is possible, to break in. On 123, for example, I had 3 downloads last month. My best month there was last May, when I made almost 2 dollars, with about 7 downloads! But that is sure much more than CanStock, where I have earned, in the past six months, .50 cents!

    Keep up the good work, Steve. Things ought to get better.

    Lets hope that july was the peak of the stock recession and that the future will look brighter.

  1. August 4, 2016

    […] my post yesterday, I worried about the drop in earnings (in total and per online image) on Shutterstock, and as their financial results came out today, I did a bit of a calculation to […]

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