Selling Stock Photos in December 2020

A month to end a year that we would all like to forget, I guess! And I will get back to the full year in my annual review of stock activity that I will write in a few days when the final results are in. But lets start with a world first (for me…). For the first time in my 14 years of writing about stock photography (and talking about it at this well reviewed introduction to stock photography video) one of the agencies has displaced the agency that we love to hate as the number one earner. Yes, Adobe Stock has displaced Agency X in the monthly earnings stakes, producing $575 compared to a measly $552 from the other one. Congratulations to Adobe! Overall, it turned out to be a pretty good month. Very slow in the final 10 days or so as you would expect, but some good sales early in the month helped me to get to $2998! But wait…. one of my dark horse agencies took a long Christmas break and hasn’t reported earnings yet (yes, EyeEM…) and so I think (hope) that I earn more than $2 there to take me over the $3000 watershed. I had hoped that 500px, which I rarely look at, would be the agency to just take me over the barrier, but I found some earnings there for 2020, but not enough to make a difference. It was $0.02…

So what does the month look like in comparison with the others:

As you can see, December 2020 made quite a leap over previous Decembers and just beat the November total. So lets look at how the agencies did to get in more detail.

Agency Performance

As I mentioned, Adobe Stock turned out to be the highest earner in December with $575. Not its best performance (as I have had $758 back in March) but enough to take the crown for this month. iStock has continued its pretty good performance with November results of $504. Many of my virus and particularly the election shots have done pretty well on iStock this year and that continued in those November sales. It will be interesting to see how it does in December as I found that many agencies reverted to selling more “normal” images and videos as the focus moved away (just a little) from voting. I was really slow in getting my act together for vaccine shots and I may have missed the boat there.

Canva continued to be the most pleasing agency with the extension of their offer to double March earnings and so I have booked $298 again for them. The Pond 5 came in with $195, a big leap from the previous $43 and the sleeper agency Zoonar came up with a shocking $93 in the month thanks to an old image that I put on Alamy via them back in the days when I found Alamy just too hard to deal with. Creative Market bounced back with $102 and even Dreamstime beat the $100 barrier with sales of $110. I’ll summarize the earnings per agency in my annual report so that you can judge them without special factors that might have influenced one month’s sales.

To let you compare earnings with assets, here are my files per agency at the end of December:

I was pretty relaxed about uploading in December, adding just 40 assets in the month. I have put far more effort into adding to my Fine Art portfolio which I will talk about in a future post when I hopefully am able to report that it made a difference to sales!

What sold in December?

Obviously to get to these results, I must have had some bigger than normal sales, and that was true in December. This month, it was videos that saved the day with total sales of $357. A long way from the “good old days” of video sales, but still a nice bounce:

I have around 580 video files online – some commercial, some editorial at Shutterstock, Adobe Stock, iStock (fewer), Pond5 and, most recently at Dreamstime. The sales are almost always from SS, Adobe and Pond5 with ridiculously low priced sales from iStock. As I have written in the past, I don’t feel “disrespected” or my “art” is being devalued by getting a $1 video sale at iStock. I believe that I am unable, as a contributor, to materially change which agency buyers decide to choose and so if someone is searching for a meatless burger video on iStock, they will buy one there. If my version is not available, they will buy someone else’s version. So I might as well take their money. I know others have a different view of this and I have no issue with that. We each do what makes sense to us.

So back to my story. Getty did sell one image for more than $10 with this one that earned $37:

CanStock (of all agencies) surprised me with two sales of old images at $20 each. Not something you see every day!

Creative Market was a winner this month with an extended commercial license for this image of the New River Gorge bridge for $40:

But, as I mentioned, videos were the real earners at the higher prices. First, this one of rough seas off the front of a cruise ship sold on Pond5 for $112. The same one also sold for $20 on Adobe:

And then Adobe Stock sold a video of some steaks in a sous vide container which sold for $108:

Perhaps I should start a sous vide cookery website but I’m getting quite good at cooking this way. We did our Christmas Turkey in the water bath for 24 hours and last night (New Year’s Eve) we had an 8lb (4Kg) prime rib roast that also was cooked for about 20 hours before 15 minutes in the oven to crisp the surface. Delicious!

Well that detour is a nice way to end this month’s report. I’ll be back with my annual report next week, but in the meantime, I wish you all a Happy New Year!