Making money from stock photography – Nov 2021

The November issue of my monthly reports on earnings from selling photos and videos online is out. OK, it is here, but that first sentence sounded more impressive!

For quite some time I’ve been a bit displeased with the way the earnings were trending, but at last we have a break in the pattern with earnings of $2925. I’ll bump that up a little more as the story unfolds, but that is well above the $2425 I saw last month. Just to add a dampener to the celebrations, though, all four of the previous years in November were over $3000 so this is not just as great as it seems for the longer-term health of this business. Here is that graph showing all five years’ worth of earnings from my photography:

This is on a portfolio of around 16,500 photos and 580 or so, videos:

The big change this month was the income that came not from stock agencies but from the Print on Demand sites that I have been spending more time on. I’ll cover this a little later in this report.

But first, the agencies. The first good bit of news was that I was checking my Alamy sales and found income of $160 from DACS payment. This is a scheme in the UK to gather royalties from magazines and newspapers (I think) for the subsequent use of images. You can apply for this yourself, but it is easier to get via Alamy in my view. Then I saw $38 from ASCRL June 2021 payment. I think this might be something similar, although I am not really too sure! I saw an email from Getty yesterday to allow them to claim royalties from a similar scheme in France (on my behalf). Will be interesting to see how that plays out. As a result of these, Alamy came in with $326.

Shutterstock as usual was the highest with $612, followed this month by iStock which reported a very nice $524. There was a $75 video sale in that total taken with my drone on Hawaii. That certainly helped the total this month:

Adobe is pretty consistent from month to month – this month it was $459. We rapidly drop down then to Canva with $129, Deposit Photos with $104 and then Pond5 with $97.

Videos did pretty well in November to be honest with a total of $198. I work a complicated little scheme to try to put the iStock sales in the correct month and so that $75 video actually got put back into October as that was the month it occurred, so my overall photo/video split looks like this:

I had 13 sales of videos, with the highest price being this one on Adobe for $24.50:

Although this looks like a drone shot, it is actually taken with a 200mm lens from some distance away to get a nice close view of the smoke and steam. As I have said before, climate change will be in the news for many years to come and so having a good set of images and videos in your portfolio will pay off.

The highest sale of an image came from Shutterstock with this one selling for $86:

This is a perennial best seller with total sales now over $1600. I don’t really know why – it is nice but nothing particularly unique. Still, I don’t complain! I made a version with a different sky that has added $492 to that total. All the other photo sales were $30 and under and no particular pattern.

So what made the difference this month – Fine Art! I have been focusing more this summer on two things – adding more images to Fine Art America from my portfolio. I had less than 1000 earlier in the year – now I am at 2150 or so. I add them a few at a time to try to not overwhelm social media and I have it set to automatically send out a tweet with each new image. The other string has been to spend more time on Pinterest and Facebook (and LinkedIn) to try to build a following. I’ve written about this several times this year in my Social Media posts. I count Fine Art sales as coming from Society6 and Fine Art America and those two sites earned $81 and $319 in November. Six sales on Society6 and six also on FAA. I used to average one sale a month on FAA, so this is quite a change. October had three sales there.

I know that my Facebook activities have definitely paid off here – 3 of those FAA sales were for local scenes and one of those came from someone who contacted me on a local Facebook group dedicated to the town I live in. This was for a 36 inch framed print of the local river in the fall:

There is a school of thought that only your best images should go on Fine Art America – a curated collection. But I’m not sure I would have put this particular image into that category – it is nice, but not one that I immediately would have chosen as my best. So it just goes to show that people buy what they like – not what I think they should like!

My other venture this month has been to create a calendar of my local town:

I’ve sold 20 copies of this (including these four that I bought) for a total of $160 profit. Print on demand calendars are not that cheap, so I think I could have sold more in local galleries – I’ll use one of these to see if there is a demand for 2023 and print some in advance at a lower cost. I created three different calendars but only really promoted one of them. This is not included in my graphs above as it is a bit of a one off thing.

Bottom line – pure stock is not doing too well, but there are other opportunities out there!