Earnings in September 2015
Finally, a bit of good news. Shutterstock is still in the doldrums (with earnings this month of $877), but most of the other sites showed some positive improvements so that I ended the month with at least $2375. I say at least, because I noticed that on the first day of September I had a $50 sale in iStock’s partner program, which means that my normal estimates for iStock sales are probably low.
What was good in September – 123RF came in with $156, which is the highest I have seen from that site. I didn’t investigate exactly why, but it looks to be some higher value extended licenses that pushed up the earnings. Canva is doing very nicely with a record $179 in the month – previous high was $130 on that site. I have been uploading some PNG files with transparency to Canva, as I can’t wait for their internal processes to cut out my images against white, and those are selling nicely. On Alamy/Corbis, I had a pretty good month with sales of $259. The rest just continued as normal, which I guess is good!
I add the graph next month, but it looks like the earnings are stabilizing. Still lower than I was achieving a year ago, but to be honest I haven’t done much with stock images this summer so this is largely passive income. I have a whole lot of images to process and upload from my recent vacation, so perhaps that will start to show results in the coming quarter.
Something bad is happening with Shutterstock. My sales have gone from bad to worse in a few months. 50% down. I’m back to 2013 with my earnings. And lots of days where sales just stop mid-day and nothing sells for hours. As if the port is programmed to switch off and hide itself from search at certain times of day.
I hear you. Same thing with me. I was regularly above $1000 a month, but these days it is hard to get to $800 even though I have more images for sale. Some days are good, others are very poor. That is why I’m keen on spreading my portfolio around as long as it isn’t too much work.
september sucked, but november was half of september. waiting for your update to see if you too are affected and if ss made another search change, punishing long-time contributors. cant get it anymore. getting worse day by day.
Hi – Shutterstock looks pretty terrible this month, but I will post some comments once the month is past