Making money from your photos – April 2019

Somewhat delayed, my earnings report for April! But first, a shout out to my good friend Alex, who has been regularly publishing interesting and insightful blog posts at his Brutally Honest Guide to Microstock, and now publishes his earnings each month. Alex has different approaches to me – in particular he is separating out his best images for Robert Harding as exclusive RM as well as uploading specific ones for book covers at Archangel. Interesting to watch how his earnings are growing.

As to my own earnings for April – I ended with a pretty reasonable $3063. Well below the record setting $3672 for March, but not too shabby at all. I had been watching the relatively slow sales as we went through the Easter period, and my main agencies didn’t actually do anything special, but I really made up for their shortfall with a great result from EyeEM – $197 from sales via their partner Getty. What I find interesting (or strange) about EyeEM is how the same few images sell many times. I have 691 images that have been selected for their Partner Program, and at present I can see 337 of those currently on Getty. EyeEM themselves have over 6M! When I look at what sells, it usually ends up being multiple copies of these two images:

Sometimes I get $1 for them, sometimes as much as $40. What is also intriguing is that the cat rarely sells on iStock, and so this “backdoor” to Getty has really proved to be a winner for me.

Back to the results:

As you can see, this was actually well above most of my April results, but well below last April. Not sure what was special about that year, but I’m happy with the performance this month. It does appear that my results with video sales are the ones that make a difference between an acceptable and a great month. Video this month was down from the heights:

which also shows up in the split chart between still and video clips:

And finally, my chart of uploads.

I slowed down in March and April – mainly because I had two trips to England to help my daughter find and then move into an apartment. But that gave me more opportunities for stock images!

I had some largish sales this month. Some of relatively banal images such as this one that sold for $40 on Shutterstock:

Pond5 also did pretty well with just over $200 of sales including three shots of a steam train I took a few years back on a “photographer’s excursion” on the train from Cumberland, Maryland. Looks like I tried zooming out and panning on this one:

Well, that’s enough for April. Lets hope we all do well in May!