Say again – earnings from stock photography have increased?

Yes, it’s true. For the first time in many months, my earnings in April 2022 have exceeded the previous four years earnings. Hard to believe, I know, and this was in a month where I uploaded exactly zero new images to the agencies. I’ve been on a trip to England for the past 15 days, which partly explains that, and also explains why this report is late. But back to the story.

Earnings in April shot up to $3407, compared to $2613 in April 2021. Quite an increase and very close to my record for April sales of $3489. Here is my usual graph of monthly sales over the past 5 years:

Just for the record, here is my total number of files in the various agencies:

As I mentioned, this is exactly the same graph as last month. No new assets, although this now shows that I closed my Canstock account in March. If only I had kept that open, I could have earned $5 more! I closed that account because they were supplying the images to a partner of theirs who was selling prints of my work at much lower prices that I was trying to achieve in my own Print on Demand sites.

Focusing on Fine Art Print Sales

So, what explained this great month. To a large extent, it was those sales of my Fine Art Prints on the print on demand sites! As I have mentioned in previous articles, this is a new focus on mine, partly because I have become disillusioned with adding new stock specific imagery and have not been able to travel very much, and partly because there is a certain frisson from learning that someone has bought one of my images to hang on their wall. The ultimate “Like” option!

I spent the early part of the month adding images to my new portfolio on Pictorem. I chose this site because they had free shipping to North America and also seemed to have a young and enthusiastic development team. That link is also my referral link so if you are thinking of signing up to Pictorem, please use that link and I might get a small commission! I also spent a lot of energy (although not a lot of time) retweeting work from similar artists as I explained in this article. I currently have 470 images on Pictorem, compared to 2500 or so on Fine Art America and I am being more selective on what I upload. What has really surprised (and pleased me) is that in April, I sold three metal prints from Pictorem. Not ones that I specifically promoted, although they are in areas of the world I have promoted, and so I’m guessing that they were found from Google searches where the Pictorem option came pretty high in the results. I see this myself when I search for images of particular areas – Pictorem ranks pretty highly. One of the images has already been discussed in this article about recent print sales on my website dedicated to art buyers rather than photographers. The other two were of a sunset in San Diego with an artificial sea:

The other one was also of Kauai and was a 36 inch metal print.

This last one actually sold on May 1st and so is not included in the April results.

I priced these images differently to FAA with a markup of $20 per square foot of print size. I think this might be persuading people to go for larger size prints.

Finally, I also sold two prints on Fine Art America for a total profit of $264, making my earnings from this category (including Society 6) of $695. Not bad at all!

Earnings from Stock Photography

Back to the stock agency game. SS had a reasonable month (compared to earlier ones) of $559, and iStock was also pretty good with $481. However, Adobe knocked both out of the park with total earnings there of $686. Not as good as March’s $753, but much better than the historical totals. Canva continued its run of good months with $220. I don’t know what sells over there (as almost all this is subscription income), but I’m glad they like it! Alamy was not great this month with $128 after the refund of a $120 sale. That was a disappointment! Pond 5 was reasonable with $125 and even Dreamstime passed the $100 mark with sales of $107.

Video was OK with totals of $110, but I have not really done much with video for quite a time. It is hard to get enthusiastic about it to be honest!

Examples of higher priced stock sales

So, what made the money in April?

The leader of the pack was Shutterstock this month with this sale of Manhattanhenge for $35:

I’m glad this comes round twice a year! Always nice to see a good sale of this event!

Next up was one of my “created” images from the early days of the pandemic which sold as a still image on Pond5 to net me $35 as well:

Adobe stock did not want to be left behind and I sold this image of one of our cats from way back in 2012 for $33

My more recent images rarely appear in this list of high priced sales, but one did this month on Alamy to net me $17:

Not the greatest shot in the world, but it has at least earned something!

I sold two videos of opioid tablets and bottle and also one flying towards a power station. All told, my images and videos with earnings greater than $10 totaled $377 in April.

Well that rounds up the month. My focus this month is processing and uploading travel shots from Cornwall in southwest England, getting more images online with Pictorem and continuing to boost my images on Twitter and the other social media sites. Another busy month ahead.