Earnings – what on earth happened in August
August seems to have been the worst month for a long time for me. Shutterstock was a disaster – just $786 and that includes a $96 sale in the Single on demand area in the final week of the month. Without that, it would have been less that $700! Back in January and February, I was regularly hitting $1000+ – since April it has been downhill all the way. It just goes to show that diversification is important – if you are only on one site, you suffer along with that site.
Unfortunately, it was hard to see many bright spots in August. Deposit Photos was OK at $128, Alamy with $126, and iStock with my estimate of partner earnings at $260 or so. Finally, Canva hit a new record of $130 for August.
The end result – not even $2000 with just $1945 in sales. I didn’t post last month’s sales, but they were $2160 – not great, but at least over that $2000 barrier.
Here is my graph showing the decline in the past month or two:
Earnings from Stock Photography
Hope you are doing better – and lets hope September pulls out of the pit of despair!
In August Alamy hit my record in sold licenses and for SS it was not bad month, also Picfair and FAA made nice sales, like never before… July was much worse month for me. I believe things will increase since Sept. now. Actually I already see great month start!
Many people say that SS and other micros sales fall down month by month, maybe it has something to do with Canva? Where did the clients go?
That’s great news about Alamy and FAA. It is a long time since I had a sale there! I’ve never looked into Picfair – do you get a good return on the effort for that site?
I have regular monthly sales (with only over 2k images) on Alamy since 2013 (700 files back then) and growing but I know not many people can say about sales there… even with 10k images. Well, I deleted my work from micros and focused on macros so that helped a lot – I see results in stats – after only few months doubled earnings!
About Picfair, to be honest there is no effort, not much work to do, just upload and forget. They are very new and offer specific licencing model (a little bit similar to Canva), but this year Benji did something magic what is bringing more and more sales for people. In my case it is very promising seller 🙂
I’m surprised you didn’t try them yet! 😉
same thing for me. august was ~600, regular sales go up to 800-900$. total disaster. and september is on the way to be even worse. ss is going downhill..
This is far too early for me to identify a new trend, but I have had 3 enhanced and one $21 single license this month. In general, though, I agree – SS is going downhill!