May 2012 Earnings from Stock Photography

Selling photos is certainly getting interesting with another great month in May, easily exceeding my best month to date in April 2012. This month I ended with $1608, after the adjusted earnings for April of $1537. I adjusted April as I later found a reasonable sale on Alamy late on the evening of 30 April and, strangely enough, the same thing happened this month – a $108 sale for a book illustration on the 31st May. That made six sales on Alamy for the month – a pity four of them were their “novel use” license for $1 each, but the other two at $108 and $126 were excellent (this is the gross sale before the 40% commission that Alamy claim. Shutterstock was fantastic – well over any previous best with total sales of $636, helped by six Enhanced Downloads. iStock was close to my best ever (and may get there once all the partner earnings are in (as I estimate these on the low side and then update when all earnings have been posted) with total earnings of $269. Some great days, others with next to no action, but it is the end game that counts. Photodune picked up again after a lull to come in with $25, but iSignStock seems to be going downhill fast with sales of only $15 this month. As we now expect, Zoonar and Panther are useless – I am seriously considering stopping any more uploads to Panther as it is hard work to keyword images on the site and the sales are virtually non-existent. Other sites were pretty much where I would expect. I continued to add new files in the month, with 103 images added to Shutterstock and 70 added to iStock. CanStock grew by 150 to end with 3374 images online. Here are my normal graphs:

Earnings History

Files Growth

Files per site

Earnings per Site - May

Earnings per site 2012