Is Stock Photography for you?

I was looking at my recent sales (using Microstockr Pro) and was struck with how often the images that I have created in the past year have shown up in the thumbnails. I usually do this at least once a day as I find that just scanning the sold files gives me a good idea of which themes are selling and also those small size images also give me feedback on whether my images, which might be great on a full screen monitor, actually are recognizable and impactful at a smaller scale. As you know, buyers might first come across your images at this size and so it is important that they are clear enough to get their attention and click on them to get a better view.

Can you really make money these days?

But what this most recent review made me wonder was – is it really feasible to start with stock photography now? As you know, I sell a book telling you how to start in Stock photography, but with all the issues in the business right now, is it still possible to make money? If I read the posts on the Microstock Group, it appears the answer is a firm NO, but what did my sales in 2020 tell me?

Apart from Alamy, I don’t think the length of time a contributor has been with an agency makes much of a difference on whether their newly uploaded files get traction and start to sell. In fact, we used to theorize that Shutterstock had an incentive to favor images from new contributors because they made more money if those images were chosen. It is certainly the case that new contributors to Shutterstock now get the lowest payout percentage, which will impact what you earn, but not whether your new images will sell.

So how did I analyze this? Well, I like facts and also wanted some facts that were representative. So I decided to choose a period of two months – July and August 2020. I chose these because I wanted to include my iStock sales, but I didn’t want to include the early days of the pandemic when I was lucky (yes, that helps!) to get a lot of sales from my cinema marquee board that I have written about before. So I looked at my images that sold in those two months on the agencies that Microstockr Pro tracks (12 in my case). Even using the matching function (which combines the sales of a particular image across all the agencies), I had sales on almost 1300 unique images and videos in those two months and earned a total of $4500 from them in July and August. I decided that if I had just started anew in stock photography, I should look for sales on images that I created and uploaded in 2020 – a mix of some travel shots from Hawaii in January with the images that I have been creating at home since the pandemic locked us down. All told, I have added about 700 new images and videos in 2020 – mainly images.

Okay – so how much did these images earn?

Now for the boring task (for me). I eyeballed each thumbnail to decide what it was and when I had taken and uploaded it. If it was a 2020 image then I noted down the amount it earned in those two months in a spreadsheet. Then onto the next, and the next… At the end, I had found about 190 different images and videos that had been created in 2020 and sold in July and August. That is interesting in itself – shows that I’m perhaps getting better at deciding which of my shots is worth keywording and uploading.

There was a very long tail with these images. The first 9 images (plus one video) earned a total of $510. The next 10 earned $159 and so on. When I got to images 101 – 110, we are down to $14 and I must admit I gave up before I got to the $0.02 sales from iStock towards the end of the list.

Overall however, those images created and uploaded in 2020 earned a total of $1090 in the two months or $545 per month on average. Not to push this too far, but all of the concepts I created in 2020 were shared with members of my Premium club as I created them and most of them are images that you could create anywhere. I have to admit that my best selling image is one of a US social security card that for some reason has taken off on Dreamstime and Alamy and it would be difficult for anyone outside the USA to create that, but the next best seller with sales of $81 was created on my computer from a couple of simple photos of shelves of books that was copied and multiplied and then blurred to just make a simple library background.

Fourth on the list with total sales of $50 in those months was an equally simple one – an illustration of voting by mail.

This is so simple I’m almost embarrassed! The envelope is all wrong for this sort of absentee ballot as the real thing looks like this:

So my simple envelope with a made up address and an election sticker (which could have been made in Photoshop) has earned $140 since I created it, and $71 (with a slightly different variant) in these two months.

Next up with $46 was another made up concept – the upcoming rise in evictions due to people not having enough income to pay their rents due to the virus. I first mentioned this concept back in May and I think it still has a lot of life left in it as a concept so I just created a letter announcing an eviction and added a face mask:

My various eviction images have earned almost $170 this year. Not great in itself, but every new concept adds to the overall income now and in future months as long as the concept is still being written about.

What about Videos?

I didn’t do very many videos in 2020 even though I keep telling myself I should do more. However, the best selling concept in July and August was this one created from me standing in front of a green screen and then composited onto an older image of an airport:

This one sold on Pond5 for $30. The only other 2020 created videos selling in July/August were ones on iStock for which I got sub-$5 payouts…

So what is the message?

If there is a message I want to leave you with, it is that I still believe it is possible to earn a reasonable amount with stock photography in 2020 and these numbers go some way to demonstrating how you can do that. This is not enough to live on (in most countries), but it didn’t take a lot of time or effort and hopefully the images I created this year will continue to sell into the future. I admit that you need to be always thinking of new things to illustrate (or take advice from others!) and you need to approach each concept thoughtfully and skillfully to get the best image you can, but it is still possible to make something before the whole industry collapses under the weight of all the free stock photo sites that are out there! Maybe I am lucky, but how many times can we attribute luck to ongoing sales?