Sales from stock photography May 2022

All in all, a pretty good month with total earnings of $3016 although not as good as I achieved in April where I managed to end up with $3407. What really made last month special was the number of prints sold, especially on Pictorem, and this month was OK, but nothing like as good. Still, this is the highest May for 6 years, so I cannot complain!

As usual, here is my graph of earnings:

I didn’t add any images (well OK, I added four) to the stock agencies in May, and so my files per agency graph is the same as last month:

Agency Results

Once again, Adobe was the out and out winner in terms of sales in the month with a total of $711. Interestingly, this included $ of video sales with Adobe. I hope that is an increasing trend over the coming month. Our good friends at SS came second with $615, which is as high as it has been for a while, and iStock was a very reasonable $455. The site that has really surprised me recently has been Canva. My last five months of earnings there have been $174, $194, $184, $220 and now $256. I have no idea what is selling as the sales all come from subscriptions, but I have obviously uploaded something there that is catching on among their users.

I have to admit here that I have joined Freepik – the earnings that others were reporting seemed to be too good to miss and the site is there whether I join it or not. It is hard to tell just what the long term will be as I have added images most weeks since early April and there is a bump in earnings with each new stack of files. They are quite discriminating in terms of what they take. As I told a friend of mine – they already have a lot of free images and so a paid image must be significantly better (or rarer) that the ones they already have. I have about 5000 images online now and more to upload (which uses FTP and is pretty painless). I earned $73 in April and $178 in May. It will be a couple of months before I can estimate a run rate on this agency.

The other sites bring up the rear pretty regularly, but each of them helps achieve the overall total.

Best Sellers

Funnily enough, SS came up with the two highest earning images in May. This first was this very old shot of a broken wineglass:

I think I took this about 10 years ago in one of my attempts to properly light glass. I had a backdrop with a white surface and during the shoot, this fell on top of the glass and knocked it to the floor resulting in this mess. This particular image sold for $52.50 and altogether it has earned around $250. SS also had the number two big earner with this image of Cheat Lake near Morgantown which sold for $43.75.

Then two more images sold on SS for $34 each. This is a reasonably recent one of me paddling my canoe on the river in Morgantown. Just goes to show what can sell! I took this with a GoPro.

The second $34 image was of the Ferris Wheel at National Harbor outside Washington DC:

Then we had the various $28 video sales on Adobe Stock. I sold two copies of this one of me looking out at the ocean from a cruise ship:

I’m planning to start cruising again soon, so I must be sure to take my tripod and get some more of this sort of video for my portfolio!

This month, assets that sold for more than $10 added a total of $430 to my overall earnings. These really make a difference between a good and a mediocre month. Last month, this was $486, but that included about $110 from Getty. I only see what has sold on Getty much later in the month.

I sold $158 of prints and small products on Fine Art America and $90 on Pictorem in May. Again, a good addition to the overall totals. I have spent much of this month adding new images to Pictorem, often reprocessing them to give them more vibrant colors, which seems to be in vogue just now. I currently have 850 images there now. My portfolio at Pictorem is here if anyone is interested!

Well, that is it for this month’s roundup. I hope you are seeing some improvements in your earnings!