Selling stock photos in February 2022

The shortest month of the year! Does that mean those stock agencies will leave us with a shortfall in our pockets? Unfortunately yes!

Monthly Earnings

Another interesting month that set a record as the lowest February in terms of stock earnings since February 2013! I know that Alex talked about inflation hitting our payouts in his monthly report, so just think how far I would have to go back to get an inflation adjusted record! February 2022 came in with a total of $2302. To be honest, that was a little better than I was expecting but well below the $2860 I earned last February. Here is the chart showing the very poor start to 2022:

And, of course, my files per agency. Very little changed from the January totals, which perhaps tells a message in its own right!

Going back to the first chart – just look at the bars for 2022 in comparison with previous years – pretty terrible!

The first thing to note this month is that the number of higher value sales was up considerably over January. I reported, in last month’s earnings report, that I had just 4 images that earned more than $10 and they earned a total of $78 between them! This month, that total jumped to 13 files for a total of $268. The total number of downloads in the month of January was 2012 and this month it was 2004! So even though the month was a bit shorter, the downloads were actually up a bit. However, the thing that really impacted this month was those larger sales. I’m coming to realize that while we can do little about the number of larger download earnings (except upload images that perhaps are more interesting in larger sizes or on products or other enhanced sales), that number makes a big difference to our earnings in any particular month.

Examples of higher value sales

A couple of things to note here. The first is that sale on CanStock. It has become very clear that my transition to being more of a “fine art” photographer (and I hate that term to be honest) is being hindered by my lifetime of uploading all my images to the stock agencies. Perhaps in the past when we used to get higher value sales this made sense, but now I think that some people are buying images or buying prints from cheap providers such as Barewalls. They are linked to Canstock and have all my photos available as prints but at much lower prices than I sell for on Fine Art America. Here I get $20 – the same thing on a large print could have given me $200 on FAA. I noticed I had one of these in December as well from Canstock. Money down the drain! So my first New Year’s resolution – close my Canstock account as soon as I get my money from them! Just to make this little story worse, Barewalls come out very well in Google Image searches!

Also interesting are the four sales of the Apple Airtags. I told my premium subscribers a couple of months ago that I thought Apple and the privacy implications of the Airtags would be a hot topic this year and lo and behold, I get four largish sales on Alamy. These are net earnings, by the way. Apart from that, it is the normal sort of thing where I benefit from having a lot of different images online from US tax forms to videos on a cruise ship, to a lamb being fed from a bottle for a nice Spring image. It all helps and shows that you need to take almost everything you can to really make money from this!

Results from Getty in January

It is always a little confusing knowing how to talk about Getty/iStock sales. I report the amount they pay as this month’s earnings, but that is actually the payout from January and I don’t get to see the actual images sold until pretty late the next month. I got a total of $480 from Getty, which is pretty good, but was very pleased with some of the higher value sales. I got $70 for this video, and, bearing in mind we get 15% from Getty, you can work out how much someone actually paid for it. If only we could sell direct!

This was a 4K video saved in ProRes so perhaps it is going to be in a movie or TV show at some point! I also got $37.50 for a photo of a US social security card. Not sure what that is about!

Stock Agency Earnings

The winner this month, for the second time this year, was Adobe Stock with a total of $543, just slightly below January’s figure. Our favorite stock agency that reduces our commissions to next to nothing each January came in third behind iStock with a total of $423. Better than January with its $374, but way below what I was seeing last year. Then a big drop down to $227 for Alamy but then one of the surprising agencies – Canva – came in with $194. This has been growing month by month and I certainly hope it continues. I have no idea what is selling, so I keep uploading there and hoping for the best!

Earnings from Print on Demand sites

Not great, I must admit. Even though I have been pushing my sites for a year now on Social Media, I ended up with 2 coffee mugs and a small print from Fine Art America and three different prints from Society 6. Total was $50 for both sites! It pays for my annual fee at FAA, but I was hoping for more after adding probably 1000 images over the past year. Still, that is still my focus and I will write more about that this month for those of you interested in that area of the business. As part of that, I have refocused one of my sites, Backyard Image, to become a home for stories about my photographs aimed almost exclusively at potential buyers. Photographers are welcome, but that is not my main focus. Check out the link if you want to see how I am approaching this.

I think that is all I have for this month. Here’s to a better March!