Income from Photography sales in January 2024

A new year and what a poor start to the year! Yes, I know that our favorite agency resets all the commission percentages in January, but even so, January 2024 turned out to be pretty poor. Total income ended up being $2243 with my normal chart looking like this:

And my file count chart:

So, what went wrong? A couple of things really – the main one being that SS slumped from $610 in November to $407 in December and a lowest ever (almost) total of $220 in January 2024. Would you believe that the last time I was down at this level of earnings on SS was in December 2010….

Stock Agency Performance

The first agency to mention is Adobe Stock. January turned out to be the highest month I’ve ever seen on that agency (ignoring the free image buyout months). Total income was $869! Then we had a pretty poor performance from iStock (December) with $338 and then Alamy came in with $261. SS was next (!) with $220 and finally, Canva was also quite a poor month with $161.

Lack of higher priced stock sales

Often think that the reason I get good results each month is that I have quite a number of higher priced stock downloads that really moves the month from average to good. This month (with one exception) was really bad. The one exception was a fantastic sale from Alamy for $103 net.

Taking that one away from the total, all I had was 6 sales over $10 for a total of $135. Two of those remaining sales were also from Alamy – one for $27 and the other for $15. Adobe stock had 3 sales for $20 to $25 each and just one solitary sale from SS for $25 late in the month. Normally I get nothing from Adobe for over $10 and 5 or so from SS, so this was a very unusual month. The actual number of downloads on SS was not that unusual, it was the low value of sales and the lack of large sales that made the difference.

Analyzing the trends in income from each stock photo license

All this made me wonder just what the overall trends look like these days at the major agencies. And guess what – Adobe looks pretty good (and stable), whereas the agency we love to hate is not looking too good!

Here is the chart:

This first chart shows the revenue per download at SS over the years. As you can see, lots of volatility but a gradual decline over time from 80c in 2019 to an average of 65c perhaps in 2024 but the actual result in January 2024 was around 35c. No wonder my income was down.

How about return per online image. This is less useful sometimes because if I upload 600 images from a trip somewhere, there is not much chance that all of them will sell – we just don’t know which ones will.

Wow – what a slope! This is a much longer timeframe, from the glory days of 2012 (when people complained the good days of stock were behind us). But this shows a drop from 20 – 25c in 2012 down to a low of about 2c last month. Perhaps the average is closer to 3c these days, but even so, that means that 10,000 average images on SS would earn about $200-300 or so each month.

How about Adobe:

Similar timeframe and the early years were actually Fotolia which was showing the same drop as SS. But from 2015 onwards, it has improved and now averages perhaps 50c per online file with the enormous peaks when payments were made for the free images they selected. Adobe doesn’t normally have the large download prices, but the average per online file is pretty good. I don’t have a revenue per download for any other sites that SS, because I have never collected the numbers, but in January I had 1005 downloads for $869 so about 85c per download that month. Interesting that it isn’t a great deal above SS. Adobe gets there by reliable steady sales of reasonable value. SS gets there from lots of low priced sales and occasional large ones, which doesn’t always work as we saw this month.

Fine Art Sales

Not that good a month for Fine Art Sales either (although perhaps not surprising if people tried to buy prints for the Holidays). Just two sales this month for $137 profit. I haven’t been active at all on social media, so I’m sure that can’t have helped.

Do Travel trips pay off with Stock Sales?

One last question I’ll address. I’ve published analyses in the past about the income from stock sales from various cities (and Alex from Brutally Honest has done quite a few as well). In October I took a cruise down the Mississippi River and over November and December I uploaded about 650 images or so to the agencies. What has surprised me, is how quickly those have started to sell. I’ve earned about $100 so far from quite a lot of small sales of images, which is great for new images these days. I did hope that many of the places we stopped were less well covered than many larger cities and that does seem to be the case. I need some big sales on Alamy now for some of the more specialized ones!

That is all I have for you this month! Enjoy the slow migration into spring!