I’m a Photographer and this is how much you can earn from stock agencies

I must be in a jolly mood today to start with such a clickbait headline! Although I’m not sure that the actual earnings in May justifies the happy feeling.

Earnings from photography in May 2024

May 2024 was okay, but I think some of the underlying trends are not very positive. The month ended with total earnings of $2635, which is the lowest May total since 2017. Get the picture? Here is my graph:

I guess you could say that May has not been a particularly good month looking back, but even so, this doesn’t feel great. I didn’t upload any images in May, and so my total number of assets in each agency are the same as last month.

I also updated a chart I did last year which smoothes out some of the one-off payments that we get from such things as AI and the free image offers from Adobe. I amortize them over 12 months, remove the sales of fine art prints to give me a real average stock-only monthly total. This is that chart:

I’ll call this my ClusterStock chart (note that this is not the usual use of that word….). This is the most worrying chart as it shows just how bad 2024 has been compared to the previous years and how great 2021 was in retrospect! Perhaps this will all be better in June!

Stock Agency Sales performance in May 2024

SS has been up and down this year (mainly due to the changing numbers and values of higher priced sales). This month was $402, April $484, March $370, February $610 and, of course, a great January at $220. Adobe was the usual leader by a big margin – $752 and then iStock was next with $370. Alamy was pretty good with $239 followed by Canva at $191. Then we are below $100.

Interesting higher value sales in May 2024

In May, I had 16 downloads for $309. I count a higher value sale as greater than $10 and it gives me a nice way to see what is moving the needle this month. The prize for the highest value went to Alamy with earnings of $51 for this photo of Cape Horn:

Adobe was good for video sales – this one of a cruise ship in Alaska (with me walking into the frame) sold for $28:

Then I had a video sale on Adobe for $26 of this smoothly rotating video of some gold coins:

This next one has earned over $650 in total, and got another $22 from SS this month:

Fine Art Sales

Here is my chart of stock versus fine art print sales:

This one shows, again, the declining stock earnings but the fine art sales were reasonably consistent from month to month. I had three sales on Pictorem (which is the agency I have been promoting for the past couple of years. I worked out that it was a lower cost of production, and I also wanted to build up some alternatives to Fine Art America. I didn’t sell anything from Fine Art America in May, nor from Etsy, but I did have a digital download sale early in June from Etsy for $25.

This one sold for a $280 profit in May on Pictorem:

Due to my son moving to Austin, Texas, it has been a pretty busy time, and so I have done no social media activities since early May. It will be interesting to see how this impacts sales of the fine art print work.

That is all for now (and I have some packing to help with!)