July Doldrums Earnings from Photography

Well, perhaps not as bad as that sounds! June was such a remarkable month with $4600 in earnings that anything was bound to be a disappointment. And July did disappoint a little. It is never a really good month and the income of $2674 was really not too bad! Here is my normal earnings chart showing how things normally play out across the year:

I did add more images during the month, including some to iStock for the first time in months, and so my count per agency looks like this:

So, what disappointed me so much in July? It is hidden in the totals, but in June I earned $535 from the sale of my prints (my “fine art stuff”) and in July, a magnificent total of $71. The only sale on Fine Art America was a mug with a profit of $2. I do take the good with the bad, but I’ve been working on a book to be called something like “How to sell photo prints online” and I am probably close to publishing it, and then I get a result like this. Someone, somewhere is trying to tell me something!

Agency Performance

As is usual these days, Adobe Stock led the pack with a great month of $838. Not the highest ever, but pretty close (if I ignore the free image buyouts). Shutterstock was not too bad with $560, although I noticed that the actual number of downloads is as low as I have seen it for some time. Hope that is not the start of a new trend driven by all the AI work that is now available. Then we have a big drop. iStock is third, but it could only manage $320 this month. Just the lack of a few bigger sales can make all the difference at that agency. Canva is on a bit of a growth path for me, and I ended up with $271. And then Alamy was next with $247, that included some one-off payment for the ASCRL Spring Distribution. I received $37 for that. Then we are down in the noise.

Video Sales

I’m not great at taking and adding videos to my portfolio, and I haven’t budged much above 500 clips for a long time. However, this month I did earn $155 from video stock clips with Adobe taking the honors with two sales over $50. This one sold for $58:

And this one sold for $55:

It was a lovely calm night when I took the National Harbor video which really makes the reflection interesting. The Potomac river has never looked so good!

Individual Photo Sales

$372 earned from images that earned more than $10, but unfortunately the bigger sellers were all around the $30 mark. A total of 15 files met the threshold of being “big sellers” under this definition and Shutterstock had 8 of the 15. 3 from Alamy and 2 from Adobe Stock, and 2 from Dreamstime at $13 each. Those latter ones are a little concerning, because a bit of research for my “selling prints” book showed me that someone was selling canvas prints of one of my Morgantown images on eBay. I did decide to contact them, nicely, as asked where they had licensed it, and the owner of the store told me she thought it was Dreamstime. I believe Dreamstime has a lower priced option where someone can create prints from the image they license and the two sold this month are potentially “fine art prints”. Dreamstime earns around $80 to $90 a month and so I am loath to drop it as an agency, but there is a slight worry there that I need to monitor.

The other images are nothing special and not really worth showing.

Well, I think that rounds out the month. I’m hoping for more Fine Art Sales in August that I can use to justify my new book!