Selling stock photos – July 2019

A very nice month for earnings. Of course, one of the big reasons was that amazing sale on Society6 which resulted in $333 being added to my earnings balance in July, but the other sites were pretty reasonable as well. Traditionally, July is a pretty slow month for me – my previous highwater mark was $2500 reached in July 2018. Previous years had been in the $2250 range. So July 2019 came in with a very strong $2866.

This graph is getting a little complex to read, but it is still interesting to see how the earnings for the same month in previous years line up with the current month. I added a few hundred files in the month – nothing like the massive upload in June to give the following totals (stills and videos combined) in the main agencies:

Finally, my graph of video earnings. As you can see, July jumped back to the general trend after a poor month in June. I’ll mention some of the videos that helped that total shortly!

So what were the highlights? Shutterstock was pretty solid at $900 and I had a good month (in June) for iStock with total sales of $488. Adobe continued to be a bit erratic – sometimes almost $700 then down to $360, but this month was middle of the road at $416. Society6 rounded out the big hitters but no way can I expect a similar performance in coming months from that site. I have added some more images though just in case!

I’m always amazed at how poor Alamy is. I have 10000 files there, I can find my images with reasonable search terms, but I get so very very few sales. This month I got a total (net) of $32! Even Canva did better than that and that site has really been sinking fast. I just don’t know what I am doing wrong over there on Alamy. I have some of my early files on Alamy via Zoonar and I got about $50 from Alamy sales via Zoonar even after they take their 50% share. It almost makes me think I should cancel my own Alamy acccount and just use Zoonar in future!

EyeEM was a bit of a disappointment as well. I wrote in depth about some of the issues and tricks I use with EyeEM last month, and I was hoping for around $100, but I collapsed down to $40. After a couple of months of almost $200 this is a big drop, but I keep uploading to them.

I did sell one image from my own stock agency, BackyardStockPhotos, though! A cool $9.99! Now it is only losing about $200 a year on hosting costs!!

Some of my travel shots sold nicely in the month. Best performance came from this one, which sold for $65 on Shutterstock:

Then back into the studio for a triptych (!) of some beer bottles in plain white carrier which sold for $55 on Shutterstock:

Videos really shone though with some reasonably high priced sales (as well as a number of very low priced sales as well!)

This one sold on Getty for $85 and I also had a sale of a studio shots of my hand reaching into a filing drawer on Getty for $60. Although there are quite a lot of very low priced videos as well on Getty, these higher priced sales are definitely helping my totals from that agency.

Shutterstock had some nice video sales as well with traffic congestion in Beijing selling for $53:

Going forward, I’m continuing to add images to EyeEM and also Society6. I’m tempted to look into ArchAngel and their book covers after reading about Alex’s month over on the Brutally Honest site and I continue to look for other opportunities to grow (or at least maintain) my income from stock photography! Hope you had a good month as well!