Online photography earnings in January 2025

Late again with this monthly report! But I have an excuse – I broke my wrist playing pickleball and then had to go to Kauai on a working vacation. Someone has to do it, I guess! And so, I have many more images to process and upload to the stock sites. The broken wrist did help expand my portfolio though:

But back to January and earnings from stock photography and fine art prints. I ended the month with a total of $2730, which I was reasonably happy with as January is rarely a great month. The split was $2293 for stock (compared to $1830 in December) and $437 for prints, compared with the massively successful $1765 in December. I did think that December was going to be a real one-off, and I was not disappointed!

Here is my normal historic graph and the file counts as I have been adding quite a lot of images from Egypt over the past month or so.

As you can see from the graph, January 2025 was certainly better than 2024 although previous years have been better. I can’t recall now when SS introduced their reset of commissions in January each year, but that definitely does make things difficult, although with the general drop in SS in the agency rankings, it makes less of a difference each year.

Stock Agency Performance

No prizes for guessing which was the best agency again this month. Adobe Stock blew it out of the park with a total of $883, well above the December $558 number. And what is good to see (perhaps!) is that there were no single sales over $20 from Adobe this month, which means that the total came from just regular solid sales of images and videos all the way through the month. Next was iStock with $493, which again was much better than last month, and then SS was miles behind with $254. It will be interesting to see when they drop into fourth place! Alamy was next with $158, and unfortunately Canva dropped once again down to the $115 level. Just a year ago, it was regularly around the $180 to $200 level for me. Some sites have almost dropped out of the rankings – Pond5 ended up with just $5 for the month.

Individual Sales

One of the big predictors of a good month is the number of sales earning over $10. January was not great here, although the biggest surprise (of the year) was a sale on EyeEM for $64 of this simple shot of a filing system I created way back in 2016 or so:

Getty also had a nice surprise for me with a sale of a photo from Dubai in December for $56:

Counting the Getty December sales plus these over $10 January sales, I had $276 for 11 downloads, which is certainly more than I normally expect.

It was nice to see this happy little photo of penguins selling for $22 on SS. Of course, I would have received more if not for their stupid commission percentage reset!

Fine Art Sales

It was a quiet month for fine art sales, with a total of $437. I had no local sales as I have yet to really get going with displaying my prints locally. I had $63 on Fine Art America, $19 on Pictorem and then $102 profit (after the cost of the printing and shipping) on Etsy. I continue to add more images there, but it is a slow process with so many other images to process, keyword and upload from my recent trips. I am finding the AI keywording systems I test last month are proving to be very helpful, though.

That is all for this month. February has been a bit slow so far, although there is still time for some good sales! And, in case you are wondering, the featured image for this month’s posting was generated by AI based on the text and images above. I wonder which universe they are living in.

Finally, Alex, from Brutally Honest Stock has published a new book where he has used AI to analyze his best-selling images from various agencies to find out what they have in common – ie what makes then best sellers. Intriguing results!