I wish I was feeling better about this business – but January was another disappointing month for me. Perhaps I need to reset my expectations and be happy with getting a regular stream of income – which is considerable, I understand, but the effort of putting new images online and not see any benefit is a bit disheartening. It is a bit hard to see what iStock earnings are going to be as they have delayed the reporting of the...
It is that time of year again for an analysis and report of Stock Photography economics for 2016. What a year….and I’m not talking about stock photography yet! Overall, I didn’t do as well as 2015, which itself was not as good as 2014 so it looks like the best is perhaps behind us! There are some real downers for the year in terms of performance (and yes, Shutterstock, I’m talking about you), but Adobe Stock has really turned Fotolia...
For some reason, I’ve had some high value sales on Shutterstock this month, but that is a story for next week… In the meantime, here is one of the sort of studio shots I’ve been working on this month. I think I made up the words (at least I was thinking of them before I went to sleep one night), but this sort of image is easy to make and sells from time to time. The basic background was a...
Even on Christmas Eve a stock photographer needs to be thinking of saleable images! So here is a shot of my living room decorated ready for a family meal tomorrow on Christmas Day. Also available on Shutterstock, istock……! I also finally joined Instagram (catching up with social media) and so if you are there, please check out my new images. My user name is Steve.Heap. I’ve only added a few Christmassy images today but will add more as time goes...
In previous posts I have reviewed the use of Microstockr Pro for monitoring your sales and how I used it to find images that were selling well but missing from one of the main agencies. There is an alternative application on the market that promises far more detail about your portfolio and so I decided to investigate Microstock Analytics in more detail. This is a far more complex system aimed at really understanding which shots are selling and why, whereas...
As many readers know I have been using StockUploader for 3 or 4 years and it has always served me well. However, it has not been publicly available for at least 12 months and will be totally unavailable at the end of the year. So what should new stock photographers do? The answer has also become more complex for me because of the need to identify and prioritize the first seven keywords to fit in with Adobe Stock’s process and...
Another month goes by – amazingly quickly it seems. I must be getting used to the new normal of Shutterstock – fewer downloads in total and far fewer enhanced and single sales – which really hits my earnings from that site, but on the upside, Adobe Stock continues to perform nicely. Overall, I increased by a $120 over October to reach a total of $2163 for November. With Thanksgiving being a big US holiday, that isn’t too bad. Pity December...
A couple of days ago, I started re-ordering my Adobe Stock keywords. As I explained here, most of my keywords are alphabetic, because that is how Lightroom sorts them. I did meet with Julieanne Kost of Adobe last weekend at Nature Visions, and she has put in a request to the Lightroom product team to come up with a solution for this as it doesn’t appear that Adobe Stock will change their approach. The first big question – is it...
There was a post from Mat Hayward (Adobe Stock rep) on the Microstock Group forum reminding people that the first seven keywords are the most important in the search results on Adobe Stock. I’ve always found this a pain with Fotolia and most of my images there have alphabetic keywords. When Fotolia used to be a low earner, it perhaps didn’t matter much, but things are changing. Being a person that doesn’t like extra work, I decided to test if this...
I spent the weekend at the Nature Visions annual photography expo held in Northern Virginia. It is held each November and attracts some of the best speakers in the industry – Bob Krist was great and Julieanne Kost from Adobe is one of the best speakers on Lightroom and Photoshop that I have come across! If you are able to attend one of these Expo’s, it will be worth your while. However, that is not my main reason for writing....
