January 2020 Earnings from Stock Photography
At long last I can add a new post to this website! And the lucky post is my review of earnings in January. It turned out to be a reasonable month in the end – most of the month seemed to be slow and behind what I would have expected, but there was a burst of activity towards the end that helped my results.
The month ended with earnings from photos and videos combined of $2889. Not too bad at all. Here is my usual graph:
As you can see, January was slightly below the level for 2019 but certainly better than December. Again, as usual, here is my chart of the number of files on the main sites:
I added about 100 files in the month – mainly picking up the missing images from various shoots towards the end of 2019.
What normally makes for a great month of earnings is the number of videos I sell. This month – not too great:
With the actual video sales looking like this. As you can see, January was significantly down on the previous 4 months – no particular reason that I can see, so hopefully there will be a growth in February back to those new levels I was experiencing!
And one final chart before I get into discussions. This is the earnings per agency in January, excluding Shutterstock to spread out the earnings a bit more. SS was $759, which is not that much above Adobe Stock as you can see:
Adobe Stock was easily in second position here with $556 – not my best ever as I had $578 in November, but pretty close. IStock was also very solid with $468 (in December) and then we drop rapidly to my Alamy/Getty Images combination at $221. Snapwire was very reasonable as well, but this was because I photographed food from another 5 local restaurants for Doordash in January and got the $35 per restaurant fee. I think we were scraping the barrel with food quality though! Some of it went straight into the trash…
Canva is becoming an interesting site again with sales of $158 in January. I stopped uploading some time ago when earnings were dropping rapidly and they also started rejecting lots of images. Since then, they have ventured deep into the free stock photos market, but they have also been pushing (it appears) more revenue to their contributors. Here is my graph of monthly earnings from them over the years:
You can see how they initially grew, started a very long descent to less than $100 in 2017, then seemed to over-correct through 2018, then down and down to $30 or so and now we are off on a new race. I think I’m going to have a look at what sort of things sell over there and maybe consider some more uploads. This is turning into an agency that I can’t ignore any longer.
So what sold in January? Well, EyeEM bounced back a little, but mainly because of one $62 sale of my famous Bengal cat. That is all I seem to sell over there! I had four videos over the side of a cruise ship that sold for $20 or so each. Then it was just generally surf boards, Washington DC, etc. Nothing that really stuck out as an important trend at all. Here’s to hoping that February is good to us all!
Hi Steve, have you thought of posting these stock articles on other writing sites as well, like Medium or Hubpages? I think they will garner a lot of interest and readership, and each of these sites has a paying program for writers, so perhaps you can get some extra cash in the end.
Hi Mohammed
I did write one story for Medium about Kauai, but it got very little traction. I’ve not heard of Hubpages, so will look into that. My best results so far have been the blog posts for the competition on Dreamstime. This quarter is about Drones and as I am taking my pilots exam on Monday, that would be a good time to write over there!
Steve
Hi Steve
Any experience of the Snapwire marketplace?
I did submit some in the early days of the site and those images are still there. I had one sale of an image in probably 3 years, and that was early on! So I don’t really consider it worthwhile for selling images, but their tasks are worth thinking about
Good information here with details not found on other microstock sites. I have scanned approximately 5000 vintage 1980’s 4 x 6 prints that were all in very good to excellent condition due to careful storage. After comparing my prints to what is available on the microstock sites in the same categories it appears that only photos of the last few years are in demand with the exception of what is sold on getty images. Are there any recommended microstock sites for these vintage photos? Also question 2 concerns the payouts – For tax purposes to report income a W-9 is required and also to receive payouts the W-9 form is required. Are there any microstock sites that allow paypal to do the W-9 reporting to avoid having many microstock sites storing identification information especially if payout minimum thresholds are not met. For example why allow these microstock sites to store the W-9 information for a full tax year if no payouts were made, would rather only provide that W-9 information when a payout is available since several of these sites are not based in the USA.
I’m not aware of any sites that specialize in 1980s or older prints and images. I did write a little about this when I built a slide copier, but I haven’t really had the time to copy many slides. The main issue (actually two) is that the quality of film images (especially if copied from a print) is not that great compared to the pristine quality of today’s digital cameras and that clear noise free image is what people have come to expect. I also thought that the subject really needs to be something special to be interesting. My example of a french chateau in that article was a case where it probably looks pretty similar now to what it looked like in the 1970s and so why would anyone want an older less clear copy of the same place? So before you go to the effort of uploading, see if you can find any uses of similar images on the internet? Do a search of typical images that look like yours and see if they are used anywhere. I’m just not sure what the market is for them.
With your second question – I think Paypal only issues tax forms when the total amount is over $20K and there are more than 200 transactions (or something like that). But the agencies have to follow the tax laws as well, which means making sure that they are not supposed to be withholding taxes – which they do in some countries. Hence, providing your ID and your tax information is just part of the requirements. I have an LLC so I provide the EIN of that company rather than my social security number.
Hey Steve! I haven’t check in with you in a while! I’m on different login for your site. I’m the guy who runs orangepalmstudio.com (but I do not promote that anymore, I don’t want new clients haha!)
I gave your blog a shoutout in this article for the SD Voyager in my original home area of San Diego!
http://sdvoyager.com/interview/meet-jason-finn/
I thought you might find that to be interesting.
I also just hit my first $1k month in January 2020! Well.. 10 bucks shy, but you know iStock is going to take me there when I get those late-reported earnings!! Hopefully I can stay above 1k from now on! We will see.
I also want to second Mohammed’s idea of posting your content on Medium and other places. I did that for a while, but I stopped blogging (I will start again eventually). Very important: post on your blog first! You want that SEO to be yours! You can even do smaller versions and have it link to your website for the full article. You can check out an example of one of mine here:
https://medium.com/@DropThePress/top-5-best-sellers-in-stock-photography-sep-23-sep-29-2019-da0f4ebe919?source=friends_link&sk=d6a6ddaf24f6ebd193dd0373f506f43a
I just wanted to check in and share some of those things. I have some more content ideas for you if you’re ever interested in chatting about them! I might not check back here for a while. Message me on Instagram @dropthepress. I think we are already connected there!
Hi Jason – good to hear from you. Interesting article in SD Voyager (although my link is malformed…). But thanks for the shoutout! Great news that you hit $1K in January. Onwards and upwards! I also looked at the medium post – how do you see the benefit from doing this? More visitors to your site, monetization on Medium? And by all means suggest ideas for things I should write about. I’m always looking for those! I’ll check you out on Instagram.
Steve