Sales and Earnings from Photography in February 2023
Welcome to another edition of my monthly earnings report! I can’t imagine how many of these I have written now – must be well over 100! February is a short month as we all know and so expectations are lower. And in my case, those low expectations were met! I ended the month with $2317, which is not too bad, but not great either. Last year was $2294, so I eked out a minor increase! But before I get into the details, I must point you to an excellent article on the XPiks blog which took all my historical sales from Microstockr since 2007 and worked some magic on them to work out how long an image is likely to keep selling. He works out that about 95% of my total sales are likely to disappear in 20 years (based on history) if I don’t add any more to my portfolio, and my famous cat photo will likely have a life of around 14 years in total. There is far more in the article than I can explain here, so if you want to see the inner workings of a portfolio like mine, then this article is for you. I also need to thank the guys over at Microstockr for exporting the database of all my sales (369,000 so far) so that the analysis could be completed. I expect we will have some more insights in the weeks to come!
I’ve been super busy on processing and keywording for the past 3 weeks or so, after a cruise around the foot of South America from Santiago in Chile to Buenos Aires in Argentina. So far, I have uploaded 300 or so images to the main stock agencies. I’m not sure just how saleable these will be, but I did enjoy myself. I got some great images of penguins if there is a market for those! I’ve got into the habit of writing articles about the main locations I visited to try to boost my fine art sales. If you are interested, they are here on BackyardImage.com. So here is my latest agency portfolio counts after the upload of those images. I still have more to work on and upload, including a few videos.
Reasons for the drop in income
The reduction in the length of the month clearly isn’t enough to result in such a drop from February, and the main reason seems to be the calamitous drop in print sales. In January, my Fine Art work earned a total of $617, in December it was $533, but in February, this dropped to $84! Just three jigsaw puzzles on Fine Art America and very little elsewhere. Why is that? No idea! It could be that the gift buying season is over, and it could also be that I pretty much dropped out of social media promotions from mid January through to the end of February and I haven’t really got started again. I did write an article a week or so back about why I think certain images sell, and Facebook groups was a big part of that. I’ve done very little in those during the past month. So perhaps my logic was right and people forget very quickly whose photo they liked!
I clearly need to do something about this!
Interesting Sales in February
Clearly not fine art prints! But what did sell at a reasonable price this past month? The best priced download was this one from Shutterstock which earned $66:
The image has earned about $1700 so far, and a similar one with a different sky has earned another $550 so this definitely was worth the 5 minutes it took to take it!
Then Shutterstock also sold this one for $30. I remember creating this for one of those sites that asked for images to meet a specific brief – ImageBrief I think. A beer in a plastic glass:
This one has earned $1200 or so. Shutterstock was also there with a $33 sale of this cat image that was just composited together:
On the video side, I earned about $95 in total, but a very old HD video of the fireworks over Washington DC sold for $40 on Pond5.
Stock Agency earnings performance
As is becoming the norm now, Adobe was in the lead with $667 followed by Shutterstock with $514. iStock was not too bad at $377 and the next, a long way back, was Canva with $200. At least that was an increase over the steady decline in previous months. Alamy was very poor with $112 compared to $400 last month. Then we are down in the weeds!
So, overall, not too bad – it could have been worse. But I need to get back to work on promoting my print sales (or perhaps do nothing and see if they recover on their own!) I’ll let you know next month!
Always very interesting to read your blog piece on image sales and other topics, much appreciated. How is it going on Freepik? Have you tried Agefotostock (Spanish site, irregular, but occasional good sale – easy upload process)?
Freepik has leveled out at around $80 or $90 a month. I haven’t added any of the new images. I think I might leave the portfolio as it is and then I will be able to cancel as the images will have been there for 6 months. I had heard of Agefotostock, but have never investigated it. Perhaps I should. What sort of images sell for you?
Very interesting, as always. From what you say about print sales and that the reduction in sales may have been due to less promotion on social networks, I get the feeling that any MINIMAL variation in terms of work has a VERY LARGE impact on profits, making me to think that possibly I am diversifying my effort a lot: photographs for a multitude of agencies, for different types of printing and portals, promotion on social networks, perhaps contests, exhibitions…
Thank you so much!
I’m less sure if the availability of print images in different sites is as important as getting the interested public to see your work. If my theory is correct that they often search on Google images or similar, then a higher ranking there which may come from the social media activities is key. Having more than two PoD sites might not help much as they will find the first one and perhaps just go there. But it is all a mystery!
Steve, was curious to see your sales on SS, but this time you haven’t given a detailed report as before. My Jan and Feb earnings were exactly half of last years’. Keep in mind that have added, not deleted, photographs from it. On Jan and Feb of both years I was stuck on level bottom of the pyramid, so that is not a factor. Not sure what’s going on.
Hi Alessandra. My SS sales seemed to have followed a similar trajectory to 2021. So Dec 21 – Feb 22 was 566, 374, 423 and then Dec 22 to Feb 23 was 510, 340, 514. My January was pretty slow. Downloads are definitely down. If I look at downloads for those same periods, it was 21/22: 702, 866, 838 and then for Dec 22/Feb 23 it was: 700, 775, 752. Hope that helps!