Earnings from Stock Photography in September 2016
September is usually a good time of the year for stock earnings. For me, this month, not so much! I must have really hit a bad patch as I ended the month probably just scraping to the $2000 mark. I’m sure many readers would love to get to that point, but I’m only reporting on my experiences with my portfolio.
I don’t have my Alamy/Corbis/Getty earnings yet as I submitted to those via a partner, but without those I ended the month with $1903. I’ll update next week when the latest figures are in.
The big disappointment as usual was Shutterstock with $612. It doesn’t seem long ago when I was regularly over $1000 each and every month, but no more. I had a look at the breakdown of earnings between the various types of download:
Earnings from Shutterstock by Type
You can see the overall trend very clearly. I’m basically back where I was in 2012 when I had 2559 images online. I now have 6092! As you can see, the earnings from subscriptions have stagnated and fallen a little, On demands have fallen back, but recovered a little, but the real loss has been in the Enhanced and Single licenses, especially in the past 3 months. Perhaps my portfolio is getting stale and better images are now being uploaded by newer photographers – or perhaps I am now an even smaller fish in a much bigger pond. Who knows!
Fotolia/Adobe continues to shine for me, with earnings of $236, and Canva was also good with $228. For some reason 123RF stumbled from a steady set of earnings around $150 a month down to $66 with a drop in both downloads and earnings per download.
I’ve started working more on stock video and one of those new ones was downloaded on Pond5 to give me $131 from that site. The rest of the sites were all a bit so so. My own stock agency, Backyard Stock Photos maintained its steady run of zero sales! I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that selling photos via your own site is a losing proposition – nice to be able to upload what you want without fear of rejection, but it appears that while illustrators can make this work, a photographer’s work is too widely available, for free, from Google Images to persuade many people to actually pay for a license.
Things aren’t all doom and gloom though – I’m looking to improve my video skills and have bought some LED lighting to help with that. Flash isn’t much help with video! I’ll post some thoughts on that in the coming weeks.
Shutterstock has been really down for me in the past two months as well. Adobe is very promising; I started uploading there late last month and already have 7 sales so I am very optimistic. I hope the trend continues.
I had slightly better month than the previous ones, with two sales on Alamy for very few (both together under U$ 20) and cents here and there from the other sites. Istock has not computed it’s partners yet, but overall I have made short of 60.U$, the most I’ve made in mine 9-months in stock except for July, when I had a 100 U$ sale on Alamy.
My earnings on Ft in Sept were half of my earnings on SS… but I like the fact that Ft is picking up, and the kinds of images I sell there are different from those that sell at SS. However, they are more restrictive about the kinds of images they accept, and I cannot make sense of their rejection reasons. One interesting rejection I had, however, was easy to understand, it said plainly that the image was ugly L.O.L. (not in these exact words but that’s what they meant).
My largest port right now is on Alamy with 600 images, and the smallest on Fotolia, 327. I am considering stopping contributing to CanStock and Zoonar, since there are no sales there and I can use the extra time to upload to the other sites… Oh well. Choices.
I’ve thought about dropping Canstock, but it is such an easy site to submit to that I just keep going!
I was also about to write that I hadn’t had a sale on Alamy since July, but when I went to the site there was a $160 sale sitting there! I must think bad thoughts about that site more often!
Steve
Steve, right now I contribute to SS, Ft, Istock, Alamy, zoonar, DT, 123 and CanStock. When does one decide when it is a good time to quit a particular agency and is there any other out there would be worth a try, given my port http://www.shutterstock.com/g/AlessandraRC ? If it is one that has referrals I will be glad to click on your link …
Any penny counts right?
As for videos, I feel a little put off by having to learn yet another skill, and then by the time I am really good at it there will be millions of other people as good as or better and millions of videos out there.
I don’t know why having your own stock agency won’t pay off but have you considered selling on other agencies as if they were your partners? If that makes sense…
P.S. I am on DepoPh too, gosh I detest that site!
Hi Alessandra
Funnily enough I have just blogged about which sites I support!
Steve
Steve, are you using the Symzio submitter? It automatically submits to any site having ftp submission using the metadata. I have seen 100% data on Canstock, 123RF, and Shutterstock and almost that on several others. It makes submissions a no-brainer and no effort, even. I pretty much just go hit a button and it submits the last batch with no further effort. Well worth the $49!
Hi Walt
I’m actually using StockUploader and that works pretty well for me. However, that program is no longer available and so I was searching for something that someone who is just getting going in stock photography could use. I should investigate the Symzio uploader in more detail as I use their hosting program, and this is a good reminder to do that, but it might not be suitable for someone just starting as I think you need to have created your own Symbiostock site to use it?
Steve
Yes, it uses Symbiostock as the base program. That was why I mentioned it to you. If symbiostock worked better on “free” hosting then I would say it was worth setting up for that purpose, but the cost of hosting plus the submitter would make that much less affordable.
Steave, I see the canva site also in your messages, but that is not a stocksites like the others or is it?
Hi Chris
As far as the contributor is concerned, Canva behaves like a stock site. You upload images, they review and accept and put any isolations into a queue to be fully isolated. The users can integrate our photos into their own works on a $1 per individual use basis (not RF) and other users can use their work and we still get paid (which is nice extra earner). They also have an RF license at $10 and have introduced an extended license as well. We get paid 33%. Nice easy site to work with.
Steve
Steave, concerning the Image brief, do you have a payed acount or a free. Now I have a free and get essages that for security it would be better to have paid acount. Wonder if you have and or that have other benifits. Greetings from Holland Chris
Hi Chris
I just have the free account. I did read a bit about that security bit, but I thought it was saying that if you didn’t have your images anywhere other than ImageBrief, they would look to see if they could be found elsewhere and let you know. May have got that wrong of course!
Steve
Thx, yes I leave it also only the free acount