Making (not as much) money from stock photography

Welcome to the April edition of “how much can you earn from stock photography”! As the title perhaps gives a clue, I’ll start with the headlines – not as much as previous months or years…. I ended the month with $2613 after a much healthier $3300 result in March. As the graph below shows, this was well below my April numbers for the past 3 years as well. Not good news, but, still, a tidy sum of money bearing in mind I have been doing almost nothing on stock imagery for the past 3 months. In fact, I have added a grand total of 80 images this year. So in terms of money per hour of labor, it has been fantastic!!

As a result, my file count is pretty much where it was last month:

This will also be a relatively short post as I overdid things pretty badly last week. An hour’s paddle with my new pack canoe (a sort of kayak without the lid):

Then four hours of golf the next day (and if I count effort as the number of strokes, it was probably over 120 or so…), then, that evening I helped my son lift his kayak on to the roof of my car and that was when my back had had enough. This is the first day I have felt comfortable enough to sit by my keyboard and think about typing this. The perils of being a stock photographer I guess…

Back to the earnings – what changed? There were some standouts – Getty ended up paying me $674 for March sales – well above any previous record. Adobe was down a bit at $562, and Dreamstime set a new record at $137 including the sale of a video (a first for me I think) at $17:

The quality of this doesn’t look great – first time I have taken a link from Dreamstime. The original is 4K and much brighter colors.

I also sold a 4K Kauai shot taken with a GoPro out of a helicopter on Adobe for $35, which brought my video earnings to $97 for the month:

On this open door helicopter trip, I had the GoPro strapped to my leg taking videos and my Sony in my hand for still shots. I didn’t want to waste a second! Perhaps I have sold enough now to pay for the trip!

The big drop was with Shutterstock which dropped from over $1000 to $679, mainly because there were no really big sales in the month. Downloads were down by 10%, but whereas I had $428 in Single sales in March, this month that dropped to $132. Those occasional sales make a big, big difference to the month on that agency.

Canstock dropped from a once in a lifetime $102 in March back to $16 in April – back to normal it seems! Although Alex over on Brutally Honest got a great Alamy sale which saved his month, I had just $25 in net sales for the month.

The one site that has disappointed me for a long time is EyeEM – just $20 this month. As most of those sales are from Getty, and I already have my Getty account with the same images, I’ve decided to close EyeEM and hope that people find my own image when they are searching rather than pay an extra commission to EyeEM. We never know if they have a better ranking or better placement, but for $20, I might as well take the chance.

All told, I only had 5 images that earned more than $10 in April. This one from Shutterstock made a big difference to my results, selling for $52 on the last day of the month:

And this, also on SS, earned $34:

Those were the highlights, so I had a lot of low lights as you can see! Well, my back is aching again, so that is all for this report!