January 2016 earnings from stock photography

As I jokingly suggested in this post about a stock photographer’s year, January is never a great month for earnings and it didn’t let me down. It wasn’t too bad, to be honest, with the earnings ending at $2213, but compared to last January which had $2314, I am hardly making progress. And I uploaded about 1200 images in the past year as well. So it looks like the general rule is becoming that you need to continue working hard to keep your earnings the same! It is a good job that I enjoy photography and I enjoy traveling to interesting places, so it is hard to really call it work although I must admit that keywording and describing images is a chore.

Earnings through January 2016

Highlights for the month? Few and far between! I did sell three images from my newly established portfolio on Symzio. Only for $1.99 each, but as I mentioned earlier, Symzio is rising nicely in the Google Image searches and so I am sticking with it. The announced purchase of Corbis by a chinese group with a distribution deal with Getty has thrown a bit of a spanner in my plans to do more RM editorial work and so the ability to decide what to put on my own stock site and what to send off to Symzio become more important over time.

Shutterstock improved a bit over previous months to $935 although I started to see the lower commission Enhanced licenses they announced last month. Time will tell if we will get an increased volume, although as many people have pointed out – you don’t buy an enhanced license because it is cheaper, you buy one because you need it.

Fotolia continues to pick up – certainly some people are reporting much better earnings than I am seeing, but it seems to be more in studio stock shots than the sort of travel work I do. I still have fewer images on Fotolia than other sites, 4314 images compared to 5500 on Shutterstock, for instance, and so I probably ought to see if I can find the missing shots and upload them. That is probably pretty hard work so it may never get done!

Canva is still a bright spot – a record $203 in January. My previous high was $192 in November. I do continue to upload to them and they accept a reasonable percentage of my images. iStock is sort of OK – their direct sales are poor, but the partner program regularly comes up with some good results. I think I got two enhanced downloads in that program in December – I’ll have to wait for a few weeks to see how I did in January.

So, bottom line is that I’m still getting some nice earnings from the work I put in in the past, but growing it is hard!