Earnings from Stock Photography – October 2013

Why no earnings reports? Partly because I have been busy, and partly because Shutterstock changed their terms and conditions requiring (or at least heavily suggesting) that contributors don’t publish details of their earnings on that site. I hear that some contributors have been approached to stop publishing details and I certainly don’t want to fall foul of them as I earn a big percentage of my stock earnings from that site.

Anyway, things have continued to grow in total. I hit a best month total in September of $2553, helped by some great sales on FineArtAmerica and some really good returns from the iStock Partner Program. I normally get around $120 – $140 from that program, but September came up with $331 – including some extended licensing sales from their partners. The main iStock site gave me just $110 that month! I’ve started uploaded a lot of my older work to iStock now that they have a 999 image limit. Doing their keywording is still a bit of a pain, but I tend to pick images that are reasonably similar and copy all the keywords across each image in Deepmeta. That works pretty well.

October was still good – $2121 with a conservative guess at iStock’s Partner Program. Shutterstock did well as usual, but some of the other sites were a bit so-so. I’ve concentrated on adding more images in October with 230 being added to the Shutterstock portfolio in the month. I hope these will translate into sales in the coming months!