Stock photo earnings December 2019

I’ve been anxiously awaiting my earnings from EyeEM after their extended holiday break before I report the full December earnings and now they are in! $22… Perhaps forget that now and come back to the main story. The month was pretty quiet in the second half, as usual, and I ended with $2630, about the same as last year.

Quite a drop from previous months, but, as you can see from the graph, this is pretty normal. Just to add my other normal graphs – number of assets online at the various agencies:

And, finally, how busy I was in December with uploads:

A pretty normal month as you can see with uploads – I did manage finally to upload all the images from Portugal and am getting on top of the images I took in the final months of 2019. I never cease to be surprised about the amount of work it takes to accurately keyword each image – especially if you try to avoid lots of duplicate images and have varied subjects.

Even though the month was pretty average, video sales were a surprisingly bright spot. Every time I say this I also say to myself – you must take more videos! And every month I somehow fail to do it. It is just harder to do videos, especially in a studio setting where you need to think of ways to make the image move in some way. I had a cold last week and felt down, but decided that I looked rough enough to take some “depressed/lonely” type shots, which I think came out quite well, but I just couldn’t build up the enthusiasm to set this up as a video shoot rather than just stills. So my new year’s resolution must be – take more videos!!

But back to the video sales:

Sales were $589 in the month – almost my best ever, but showing a continuing growth month by month (with the normal variations). Bearing in mind the relatively poor overall number, videos gave me almost 23% of my total earnings this month compared with 15% last month.

So what caused this result? For some reason, I had a great result on Shutterstock with five sales of clips from the Terracotta warriors exhibition hall in China for $48 each:

These were all hand held (the place was packed with tourists) and so I stabilized them in Premiere, which does a great job of smoothing out the hand wobbles that you can’t avoid when doing these sort of pan shots. I don’t know if there was something special going on with those warriors, but I hope it continues at some point!

This one is much easier to take and perhaps does show that I am thinking more about videos. This was sold on Adobe for $28 and was a simple tripod shot of the moving ferris wheel at National Harbor outside DC. Nothing about the scene really had any intellectual property and so it was accepted as commercial without any issues.

Then Pond5 helped with a $60 sale of one of my Opioid clips:

The tablets are just calcium or something like that – but the buyers are just interested in the story, not the nature of the tablets themselves!

On the photo side there was a real dearth of well priced sales. Just five sales for more than $10 in the month. These were just routine shots – landscapes from England, one of a moth on a window screen that sold for $14:

Note that I researched this and gave it a proper formal name – that might have been a reason for its sale – you never know!

In terms of the agencies, SS was on top as usual (thanks to those videos) with $840. It would have been very disappointing if those hadn’t turned up! iStock was very good with $514 (for November) and Adobe was a bit down with $435. Canva is showing some reasonable signs of life with the subscriptions – $110 this month.

I’ll work on some thoughts for the annual report shortly, but to end how I began:

I had high hopes for EyeEM, but they grew to really impressive heights and then fell away just as quickly. I hope my articles about them are not resulting in my images being downgraded! I haven’t been adding images recently, but something is not working for me on the Getty site which provides the vast majority of their sales. Still, easy come, easy go! That is the reason we upload to multiple agencies – we never know which one will be successful next year!