Backyard Silver Latest Posts
I must be in a jolly mood today to start with such a clickbait headline! Although I’m not sure that the actual earnings in May justifies the happy feeling. Earnings from photography in May 2024 May 2024 was okay, but I think some of the underlying trends are not very positive. The month ended with total earnings of $2635, which is the lowest May total since 2017. Get the picture? Here is my graph: I guess you could say that...
I was asked about a month ago, whether I knew what the financial performance of my stock portfolio was when you consider editorial work separately from commercial images and videos. Great question, but I have struggled to answer it! The first issue is that Microstockr Pro does not have an easy way to distinguish between the two types of upload. Although all my editorial images would have a city/state and date in the description, searching for those terms (which are...
It definitely seems to be getting harder to make money from stock photography these days, especially on Shutterstock. Overall, the month was not too bad, to be honest, with total income of $2798, which is quite an increase from March’s total of $2436. Here is my usual historic chart of total earnings: And of course, some readers will want to know the size of the portfolio. I did add more images in April from my trip into Ohio to photograph...
Some months are good, some months stink… After a very poor January, February, even with fewer days, came back like a lion (isn’t that saying supposed to be about March?) And then March came along, and I ended up with total earnings of $2421, a big drop from the $2995 I saw in February. The graph looks like this – which shows how far this March has fallen from previous years: In fact, this is the worst March earnings total...
I’ve experimented in the past with trying to sell digital downloads from Etsy with zero success and so I made all the products inactive and forgot about it! But recently I was following a discussion on the Fine Art America forum about using FAA as the production partner for products sold on Etsy and some people reported some interesting success in selling via an Etsy Store. Etsy, of course, used to be entirely home-made products but now they allow you...
I’ve written a post about my experience in creating an Etsy store to sell metal, canvas and paper prints on the Etsy platform. The process would be that someone buys a print on Etsy (I hope!) and I get the order. I then place an order for that print on either Pictorem or Fine Art America and they ship the item to the buyer’s address. Easy! But how to price those prints on Etsy? I decided to focus on just...
Just a quick post in case you weren’t aware of this. Fine Art America has released a new feature that automatically creates a description and keywords for images that are uploaded without them. An image that already has those pieces of metadata pre-filled are not impacted, but if you upload an image without any metadata, or with just the title completed, their AI system will create the missing ones. I understood that they used a title (if present) to help...
It’s a common question – how much can you really earn from stock photography these days? And I must admit that it is getting harder year by year. But after a particularly difficult January performance, especially on Shutterstock, things have taken a turn for the better in February with total earnings for the month of $2986. I was updating my spreadsheet to add in 2024 and noticed that my total earnings from selling photography since I started in 2008 wasn’t...
I’ve written about Pictorem before – I now have three main portfolio sites for my Fine-Art prints – Fine Art America, Pictorem and Photo4Me in the UK. If you decide to join Pictorem, please use this affiliate link. I might get a small bonus! My reason for writing now is that I idly looked at the Sales History tab on Pictorem and saw a sale that I wasn’t aware of with a date of 18 February 2024. It was this...
A new year and what a poor start to the year! Yes, I know that our favorite agency resets all the commission percentages in January, but even so, January 2024 turned out to be pretty poor. Total income ended up being $2243 with my normal chart looking like this: And my file count chart: So, what went wrong? A couple of things really – the main one being that SS slumped from $610 in November to $407 in December and...
