Making money from your images – May 2020

Another month, another dollar. I think the original was actually a dollar a day, which I guess could be the theme song for Shutterstock these days. But how did I do during another month of lockdown in selling my stock photos and videos. Overall, not too badly although there was the one big sale on Fine Art America for $130 that really made a difference to me this month. If only I could manage to get Fine Art sales every month! My total, including that sale, was $2745. It is getting hard to know how to report things with various changes going on. For clarity, I report my iStock earnings in the month I get the payment (which is the month after the sales took place), and now I report Canva with the direct sales in the month they occur and the subscription sales in the next month when they are reported. If Canva make a bigger payment than that (which they promised to do), then I’ll readjust the month that the payment covered. So I did bump up my Canva earnings for last month because they actually paid me $298.70 rather than the $194 I actually earned. Hope that is clear (it isn’t to me!)

So after all that, I’m about level with my earnings in May 2019, but it will be quite a bit higher once I see what Canva pay! I’ve continued to add images and videos during the month with around 120 added to give me these totals:

I’ve also started uploading more images to Yay Images – partly because they seem to be much improved since their change of leadership earlier this year, and partly because they are promising to pay 50% of the sale price to contributors. I don’t necessarily expect any sizeable earnings (although that would be a nice surprise), but it is good to support agencies that appear to be trying to support contributors. I have around 130 of my videos there now.

Within the various agencies, the majority of the bigger ones were actually down this month. Shutterstock dropped about $100 from last month and almost $400 from the March results which were $1112. We are all anxiously waiting to see the impact of their new pricing approach which will be rolled out later today. It is a typical sign of the way this was managed that they were obviously not ready with the tested software for the start of June. No doubt we will see some hiccups as we go forward. iStock was actually pretty good with $480, but Adobe took a big hit from $758 in March, to $624 in April and now $444 in May. Very disappointing!

On the plus side, I had 12 sales on Alamy for $121, which is pretty good for that site. Not something that is very stable though, and so who knows what the next month will bring.

My video sales have not been very reliable either recently. After some months when I thought I was on to the next new thing, they have dropped back significantly:

I did manage to get to $200 which is quite an improvement over the past month or two, but nothing like the records I was seeing last year. I obviously haven’t cracked the code of what makes a successful stock video yet! I did have four sales on Pond5 this month, but they were all $17 to $31 sales, one of which was this 4K video from my GoPro:

It is actually from Maui, but it could fit the bill for calm seas lapping on a sandy beach in any warm vacation spot. It is always good to have some generic vacation shots that can be fitted in to almost any production, although the extreme curvature of this one might restrict it I guess!

Seeing those prices makes me realize that I need to visit the Pond5 site and see if they have been adjusting my prices again. They have some sort of rule that you are not supposed to sell videos at lower prices elsewhere, but with video pricing being all over the place with various subscription plans, it is hard to say what my average pricing is. I did have $100 of video sales on Shutterstock in May, but did see 4 sales for under $5 – presumably their subscription video plan.

Just one video sale from Adobe this month for $14 with this simple shot of an old electric typewriter typing “I can do it”

Six images sold for more than $10 in May, with the highest priced one being this on Shutterstock for $37.50

Three of the six higher priced images were on Alamy, which shows just how far things are falling in terms of pricing. This month, these 6 images earned a total of $146 . I went back to May 2019 when I had a similar level of overall earnings, but then I saw 18 images over $10 with combined sales of $516. It would be interesting to do a chart of the falling number of higher priced sales – I’ll add it to my list of things to do, but I think that could go a long way to explaining why our earnings are in the doldrums these days.

My coronavirus shots added $250 to the earnings this month compared to $582 and $509 in the previous two months. On the one hand I’m missing those earnings, but then it shows that perhaps the virus is getting under control at last. All I am missing from my portfolio now are riot images….

Hope you are all staying safe in these troubled times.