Making money with online photography in March 2026
The latest installment of my monthly reports on making money from the online sale and licensing of photography. March has been what I would call an Okay Month. Total earnings ended up at $2625 mainly due to a fall off in print sales in March. I’ll talk about that later in the report. But first, as they say on the news, the numbers!
Growth in Total Earnings from Photography
Although March was better than 2024, that is about all we can say about it positively! The trend in earnings in 2026 looks pretty dire with it dropping from $3300 to $3000 to $2625! Even looking at the March historic figures shows it pretty low compared to previous years. As I mentioned, a big factor was due to the drop in print sales, and my chart that tracks the stock income separately from fine art income shows that:
On the stock totals, the trend is following 2025, albeit quite a bit lower. The fine art income has dropped significantly. Too early to declare a trend, but perhaps there is so much uncertainty in the world that people have put off the optional choice of buying a print for their wall and gone to fill the gas tank of their car instead!
How many photos do you need to earn these totals?
Another regular chart – the number of images in the various stock agencies:
Stock Agency Performance in March 2026
I produced an analysis a couple of weeks ago about the Top Stock Photo Agencies in 2026, and this month is not much different in terms of results.
And the same thing as a pie chart:
Amazing how Adobe Stock has taken over the world. $955 from that agency in March and just $230 from Shutterstock. How the tables have turned in 5 years. iStock was not bad at $364 and Alamy is OK with $174, but we pretty soon drop into the weeds. My Fine Art Sales make quite a difference to the totals even in their shrunken form!
Incidentally, if you wonder just how many images you are competing against in the stock photography world, I came across an interesting article that Vecteezy published on their blog about the stock photo market. I admit that I hate the first part when they happily claim that this is now a $4.34B market growing to $5.62B by 2029. I always think – well where is our share of those billions of dollars? But more interesting is the size of portfolios. Adobe Stock now has 650 million assets, Shutterstock has 450 million, and there is an estimate that 30 million AI generated images have been added to Adobe Stock’s database in the past 2 years! Worth a read, and there are some thoughts about trends in stock photos and videos.
Notable Stock Agency Licenses
I normally look now at the most profitable licenses in March. Not many to choose from – just four images licensed for more than $10 for a total of $104. No videos… The best one was a $53 license on Alamy for this bobbin of golden thread. Never sold before in the 10+ years that it has been online.
I guess it could have been used to illustrate the unravelling of the gold market? Although there is another potential explanation. A friend of mine with a lot of experience with Alamy told me that:
In January Alamy entirely replaced their legacy search engine with an Amazon AWS AI led search (it’s called AWS Kendra) so all the old positioning we had gained over many years is out of the window. Views and zooms are down for almost everyone I speak to and that obviously knocks on to sales. It appears to still be in its ‘training phase’ but as usual Alamy are not releasing any details and pretending everything is normal. The main searches for travel etc. look absolutely awful so I can’t see them staying with it in this configuration for longer than they have to.
So perhaps someone really did search for “Gold market” and my image was first in the search!
Shutterstock usually has some higher priced sales. Just one for $25 of this Mississippi River Flood Museum.
A couple of $13 licenses from Dreamstime and that is it.
Fine Art Print Sales are Disappointing
Just $498 this month in Fine Art Sales and a loss at Etsy. I tried a new discount plan at the start of March – offering a cool 40% of purchases of more than $250. How was I to know that an invasion of Iran was on the cards? So zero interest in this sale. I changed plans mid-month to a 25% off everything, but I only sold two small prints all month. After spending $60 on Etsy advertising, I made a loss of $26. Fine Art America was good with two larger prints, but overall this was pretty downbeat. I knew the art market would be impacted by economic troubles, but this really brings it home.
On the positive side, I have my first exhibit in Texas this month which I wrote about here. If you are near Austin, please drop in to see it.
And one other discovery. Back in 2021, I was bemoaning the difficulty of working out which images sell best on Fine Art America as the detailed spreadsheet they provide in the Financial Balance area of the Settings section of the website is very unstructured and almost impossible to analyze. I built a complex Access Database and various action queries to create some reports of the sales of each print over time. I’ve used it a few times since then, but each time I have to work out just how to make it work again!
It suddenly came to me that I could import this spreadsheet into Google Gemini and ask it to analyze the results. Instant answers and it went further to work out the state in the US where an image had been taken (from the title) and then look at where buyers were to come up with an analysis about the geographic interests of my buyers. Could help in Facebook group posts. The prompts were all pretty simple. So if you are a FAA artist trying to understand your sales, just ask you friendly AI agent!
That is it for now – hoping for a good April!
