Making money from stock photography in June 2021

June is not normally one of my better months and this June was no change to that pattern! Actually, this June was my lowest earner in that month for the past 5 years, which is not a good start to this article! Still not bad at $2604 especially as I have been doing very little new stock work this year. Here is the normal graph with the historical story:

Often people ask how many hours I put into stock photography and it is a really difficult question to answer. They are often seeking a “hourly rate” calculation. To be honest, for most of this year, the time I have spent on this blog is more than I have spent keywording and uploading new images and it is interesting that my earnings have not really shifted very much from their trend. So $2604 from maybe 10 hours of work in June is really not a bad rate of pay! Here are my uploads to give you an idea of the effort I have been applying:

That has resulted in the following total number of assets on the main agencies:

Highlights for June 2021

First off – did my efforts in social media for my fine art prints pay off? The short answer, is, not yet… I did get two sales on FineArtAmerica, one a small 8 x 10 inch framed print of my sunset at Woodburn Hall at West Virginia University image and one a jigsaw puzzle of the Rainbow Tower at the Hilton Hotel in Waikiki, Hawaii. Total profit on those two was just $25. I guess that cover the cost of these social media posting applications, but not much more. So no real successes there yet!

Video sales are very slow these days and also pretty low priced. I did sell 16 video downloads, but 12 of them were under $5 including six at 25c each! What a sorry state of affairs. Two of the better priced downloads were of gold coins and one of a Brexit vote being shredded. Didn’t expect that! The total for videos (excluding iStock) was $75.

On the photo side, there were some nice sales. Just to show how the most mundane images can earn you money, I sold this one for $81 on Shutterstock:

This was followed by a second sale of the same image, on the same agency for $29. Hard to believe but this one image has earned over $1000 in its lifetime!

And to show you that bad habits can pay, my photos of wine being delivered in a case (for the lockdown periods only…) earned $26 from Adobe Stock.

I also sold a nice panorama from the English Lake District on Shutterstock for $38 as well, in the month:

All told, Shutterstock provided $195 of the $350 I earned from photos selling for more than $10 in the month, so that is not a bad result. It also goes to show how a few larger sales make all the difference to the month total. We can’t rely on them, but they can make or break the month totals.

Agency Performance

As usual Shutterstock led the pack with $661 – that is three months in a row in the middle $600s. Adobe Stock was next with $534 and iStock (for May) not far behind with $509. Then I had a big drop down to $170 for Alamy then $122 for Dreamstime and $118 for Canva. Two of my smaller agencies did well this month with $76 from Zoonar and $82 from EyeEM – again a few larger sales made all the difference with those latter two. Nice to have this month but next month they will probably vanish back to a few dollars.

Looking Forward

Believe it or not, I have started to take more stock images! I had a vacation in Tennessee this past week and took both my cameras and drone to try to capture some new travel shots. I was surprised to see that there are no FAA restrictions on drone flying by Nashville downtown or the State Capitol building there (and no one stopped me!) and so I captured some nice images of that city both at sunset and then again in the early morning. I’m still working on processing them and then have to keyword etc., but I should have some more images online in the next week or so. Hopefully some will be sellers – and some will definitely be new uploads to Fine Art America as well. The image I used as the thumbnail for this article is one I took in the hotel we stayed in overnight – I thought that made an interesting story.

So that is my plan for the coming weeks – add more travel stock images to my portfolio!

Update on Adobe Stock buyout

Adobe Stock recently announced a one year buyout for images that they are going to offer for free and I submitted 2252 images to them for their consideration. I found out yesterday that they have selected 100 of those and so I see I now have an additional $500 in my account over there. That is a nice start to the month of July!