Quarterly earnings report on stock photography

The months zoom by these days, and it is time to visit my quarterly stats and see what lessons we can learn. I was prompted to do this by the interesting article that Alex published earlier in the week about his earnings over the past few years and how the earnings per download had shrunk over that time. I started to wonder if mine were doing the same. I’ve done this exercise before and there had been a steady decline over the years and I did comment that if the trend continued, we would reach zero earnings by now! Thankfully, that projection was proved wrong! But what can we learn now about the state of stock photography? Let’s start with the history:

This shows the quarterly earnings from stock photography since 2014. Somewhat surprisingly, this has been relatively flat for almost six year although it is showing signs of a decline in 2021 but the Adobe purchases of images for their free collection has given the earnings a real boost in mid 2022. The third quarter of 2022 was back on track, I think. This shows the great growth of Adobe stock and the decline of Shutterstock (in red) although that site had a bump of its own last month with some great large sales. I don’t think that is on track for a repeat in October however.

The expected agencies are the top earners as usual. Canva is making a great showing and Fine Art America is not too bad. The hated agency of Freepik is providing some reasonable earnings to be honest. Some of the others are almost zero as you can see. I only upload to them because there is no effort to do so using Stock Submitter.

Now on to the earnings per download. For various reasons (mainly laziness), I have only ever recorded the downloads from SS and so that is the only one I can use to calculate earnings per download:

This is showing a downward track over the past 4 years, but the last few months have shown a growth leading to that great result in September. Is this a new trend? I personally doubt it, but I will take the earnings! Alex’s results for this calculation are much, much worse than mine but he has fewer downloads to track and perhaps that is skewing the results. I do seem to have some images that earn a lot for a single download – not sure why, but, again, I won’t complain!

How about return per online asset? I do remove the count of videos here and I also use an average of the three biggest earning agencies in coming up with the number of assets for my calculation. I have to say that this is a strange analysis to some extent – if I deleted files that rarely sold, this would soar, but I would have the effort of doing that and would potentially miss occasional earnings from those low sellers. I would have missed the Adobe annual buyout if I had removed the images they were interested in.

I think the early drop in this graph from 2014 to 2019 seems to have been arrested. This was the graph that would have been at zero if the early trend had continued. But now it seems to have leveled off to some extent. The underlying story in the main agencies tells a similar story – except for Adobe:

IStock seems to have levelled off much earlier than the other sites and then has had a slow decline since. Adobe however was pretty poor in the Fotolia days but has since improved and has had some great months when they implemented their free image purchase from us. They seem to have levelled off in terms of the earnings per image even if we remove those outlying months.

So, what does this tell us. Perhaps the worst days are behind us? It is not great that images earn so little, but continuing to feed the beast should maintain a regular stream of earnings – at least that is what I will tell myself. Let’s revisit this at the end of the year!