Earnings from Stock Photography November 2017
November certainly was a good month for me this year. Even though we have a US holiday, the sales were good throughout the month and I ended up with earnings of $3177. This is my best month ever (ignoring one special month in December 2014 when I sold an image on ImageBrief for $1060!) This continues a pattern I have seen all year where, almost without exception, the earnings in a month this year have exceeded the earnings in the same month in previous years:
This is also my first time above $3000 since March and I beat that threshold by quite a margin this month. Here are my results from each of the agencies in November:
As you can see, Shutterstock was way better this month than I have been reporting in the past, with total sales of $1083 compared to earnings in the $700s in the past few months. There were two video sales for a total of $40 so the bulk of this was from images. Of course, the $105 single sale made a big difference, but I also had two $75 single sales as well in the month. Overall, I had a total of $468 of single sales and $44 of enhanced license sales. Adobe was great as well, although that was definitely helped by a $28 sale of a bitcoin video and two $28 sales of a driving PoV video from my GoPro taken on one the narrow ocean side roads in Maui earlier in the year. Those certainly made a difference on that site, but Adobe has continued to do well for me all year:
I’ve been adding files regularly through the year, and that must have helped with this site, but overall I’ve been very pleased by whatever they have been doing over there! Here is my files online slide – as you can see I added a lot of editorial shots in November, which Adobe doesn’t accept, hence the change in the upload profile:
What else was noteworthy? Alamy was good with a total of $378, and iStock was consistent with previous months with $413. I report the amount I received in the month in my earnings report, so that was actually for sales in October that was paid out in November. Canva continued its big improvement with sales of $196 – quite a number of the $10 licenses this month. Finally 123RF showed more promise with $147.
Months like this certainly give me more impetus to take more and upload more images (or even finish the keywording and uploading of my images from the cruise in Northern Europe and a trip to California that are still waiting for attention! Hope you had an improving month as well!
Backyard Silver has struck gold!
Well done Steve 🙂
Congratulations! You give hope to us all. 🙂
Hi Steve,
Do you still upload new images to iStock despite the low RPD and questionable treatment of contributors?
Yes, I do. I know that some images license for 2c or something like that, but I assume that is for a very restricted license. I don’t think many people shop around for images between the different sites and so if someone is after an image of Bitcoins, say, they will buy one from the site they are a member of. If my image is not there, they buy someone else’s. So I would be losing $400 a month if I withdrew from iStock because they sell some images for a low amount. I don’t believe they will change if a few contributors remove their images or stop uploading – there are too many contributors around for any concerted effort to occur. So if you are in the game of selling images, you need to sell via the sites that give you the best income and accept the way they work. If someone is fraudulent, then obviously I avoid them, but otherwise I just upload to all the sites that buyers are frequenting.
I do. Istock sometimes comes before fotolia for me in earnings. They are good at negotiating higher priced images.
Sorry I meant licenses.