Making money from stock photos – Feb 2019

Another month zooms by, and time for the February earnings details. February has always been a pretty consistent month for me and this year is no exception. That sounds good, but of course I have many more images and videos online each year and the ideal performance would be a steady increase. But these days, we take what we can get from stock photography!

Total earnings were down a bit from the previous two years, but not by much, and I ended the month with $2763. I always take the earnings I receive from iStock as my earnings in that month – not completely accurate, but it is better than having to go back each month and correct the figures.

Here are my files online at the various agencies:

This graph is for both videos and still photos. I haven’t really kept good records of the numbers of each over the years. Just for background, I have 445 videos and 11186 photos on sale at Shutterstock.

Video sales were pretty good this month with a total of $250 or so. Most of the video sales were my usual opioid macro shots – the zooms and pans around a prescription bottle and some tablets. Most of them used the Edelkrone Dolly One. Although there are cheaper versions of this sort of device, I’m always impressed how they keep adding new features into the software of the device and its app. I wrote about using this back in December

This month I thought it would be interesting to see how my overall numbers are impacted by video sales and so here is a graph showing the contribution of photos and videos to my overall earnings:

And my normal video sales graph:

Notable photo sales in the month included this one from the beach overlooking the Sunshine Skyway bridge near St Petersburg in Florida. This sold on Shutterstock for $80:

Then this one (one of my best sellers with total sales of $506) sold for $36 on Shutterstock:

Landscapes seem to have done well this month with another sale of Shutterstock of this panoramic shot of a North Wales meadow for $37.50. This particular shot (some with replaced sky) has probably earned about $1500 or so since I uploaded it in 2012.

Finally, this pretty horrible shot sold on Shutterstock for $27. I’ve always thought this was a bit amateurish, but it keeps selling!

In terms of the agencies. There were not many real surprises. I still don’t know what I am doing wrong with Alamy. With over 10,000 images there I earned just $25 net! Terrible performance! Creative Market made a recovery after nothing in December and a very dry 2 weeks in February to give me $70 net. EyeEM was great after a very poor January ($9!) to give me $145, including some nice big sales from their own agency as well as the sales via Getty. I’m now looking forward for some big earnings in March – the month started well with an $87.50 4K sale (of opioid bottle again!) on Pond5 in the first few hours of March 1st. Hope that is a good sign for the rest of the month!

To close – I was very pleased to see an excellent summary of progress in stock photography from Alex Rotenberg over on his Brutally Honest site. Well worth a read! And, if you have a spare moment, please check out my blog post about shooting Fireworks over on the Dreamstime site and click the Useful button (if you are a member over there) if you like it! It all helps!