Stock Photography Earnings in February 2024

It’s a common question – how much can you really earn from stock photography these days? And I must admit that it is getting harder year by year. But after a particularly difficult January performance, especially on Shutterstock, things have taken a turn for the better in February with total earnings for the month of $2986. I was updating my spreadsheet to add in 2024 and noticed that my total earnings from selling photography since I started in 2008 wasn’t updated correctly – nice to see that the total is now almost $415,000. Would pay for a few camera lenses!

Photography Sales Graph and Files per Stock Agency

My usual graph of earnings from photography over the past 5 years shows that nice bump in earnings from January with its disappointing total of $2293.

And as usual, the number of assets I have on the various stock agencies:

AI generated images taking over from stock photographs?

I’ve been focused a lot recently on creating images for sale as wall art and prints available from the major Print on Demand sites and to some extent, I don’t spend much time (if any) on the studio type stock photos that I have created in the past. Some of my best sellers are the opioid series of pill bottles with labels showing the problematic opioid medicines but I reached the conclusion that those simple shots are far too easy to create using Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems these days. If you think of the main categories of stock photos – people, places and things, people and things are going to be increasingly created via AI to meet the specific brief. I don’t think many buyers will be creating them in the short term, but the artists will find it much easier to create and perhaps edit an AI “photo” of an opioid bottle and some pills rather than go to the trouble to create the scene and photograph it. I hear from others that they are getting more sales and revenue from a smaller portfolio of AI images than ever they did with photos.

My images still sell, but I don’t create any new versions. Instead, I concentrate more on the places images (and videos when I remember) as those are much, much more difficult for an AI system to create and there are so many places that can still be photographed in good light and from an interesting angle. So, the number of images in the chart above didn’t change from January to February as my last big upload from my travels along the Mississippi river are now all online. I created a collection of images on Microstockr Pro (as the titles don’t really allow an easy search) to identify all the sales of those Mississippi images. I started uploading in November and now am at total sales of $307 with total sales of $207 in February. So that counts as a success, so far.

Places sell better than things as wall art – at least for me!

An additional bonus is that “places” images lend themselves to being bought by someone for wall art, especially if it is somewhere they lived earlier in their lives, or perhaps went to college and want something to remind them of that time. I write a lot about this in my book about selling fine art online, but I’m a believer in the theory that most buyers reach your image through either a search on Google or similar or because they have seen your image online in a Facebook group or similar. Places images are far easier to keyword in a way that they are found in a search and certainly easier than a lovely flower image that is often lost among millions of potentially similar flower images. So, my places images also happen to be my best sellers in the fine art print area as well.

Because my focus is changing, I’ve started keeping a graph that shows the monthly earnings of stock photos separately from wall art print sales. This is the latest version:

Until this last month of February, the stock numbers had been on a depressing downward trend. Now will one month make a difference to the trend – well, I can keep my fingers crossed! The fine art print sales are more up and down, as you would expect for higher priced sales. But overall, it is maintaining some additional value each month.

Fine Art Sales in January 2024

I have some images on a site that leases prints to companies – mainly images of Washington DC, and that is reliably bringing in about $80 a month now. I had no sales locally, which is perhaps not surprising in February, and had 2 sales on Fine Art America, a jigsaw of a diesel locomotive, and then a very nice sale of a wall painting that I saw in Colorado:

This was a 48 x 20 inch print, and so came with a healthy margin. I also sold on print on Pictorem, which I talked about in this article about the issues of cropping images before printing.

Altogether, my print sales came to $485 for the month.

Stock Agency Performance in February

I’m very pleased that Shutterstock came back from the grave! January was terrible, with total earnings of $220. February was much better with sales of $610! However, Adobe Stock beat them again with total earnings of $780. Not the best ever, but pretty good. Then there is a long drop down to iStock with a total of $362, then Canva with $179 and finally Alamy with $161. A prize for best improver, perhaps, goes to DepositPhotos which increased from $65 to $127. And, finally, Dreamstime did pretty well with a total of $90. The thing that concerns me about Dreamstime is that the two images that helped get to that total were images of Morgantown, and they both earned $13, which I think is the price that someone would pay for a “print” license. So, I probably lost a much bigger margin if they had gone to Fine Art America instead. However, being realistic, anyone could pay the smallest license fee available and print the downloaded file, so I think it is a plus that they paid for a print license! This is one of the downsides of using the same files for multiple markets.

Best selling stock images

I always look at the total earnings from images and videos that earned more than $10. January was $260 from 8 downloads (one of which was from Getty at $20) and the big seller in January was one from Alamy for $103 – so you can see why my January performance was so poor.

In February (without the benefit of the Getty sales yet), I had $423 from 21 downloads over $10. The best one was actually a video of a river cruise boat on the Douro river in Portugal that earned $60 on Shutterstock:

This may have nothing to do with the sale, but I have almost finished a series of articles on Backyard Image about this Douro river cruise. May be just a coincidence, but intriguing to think that my article had something to do with the sale!

Next up was an unexpected sale on EyeEM. The only sale I saw in February and it was for $42:

This was taken on Kauai and I did approach this young man and asked if he wanted copies of the photos in return for a model release and he agreed. We sorted it out after we both got home from our trips.

There was a sale on Alamy of a Welsh themed motel in the countryside of Argentina! Just goes to show that places can sell even if you don’t immediately think there is a market for them! That sale gave me $24.

And just to continue that theme that places are worth photographing (and that AI will be pretty unlikely to be much of a threat), I photographed the Viking Mississippi cruise boat in most of the ports we stopped at last October and quite often got my drone into the air if I could. Each of the images with the cruise boat are editorial, of course, and Adobe did take them, but in February, I sold 8 of them on Shutterstock for a total of $144. $18 each:

Once again, interesting to see what sells! I know that Viking are possibly going to go for an IPO this summer, and so that could have been the reason, or perhaps Viking themselves wanted the images for publicity and marketing reasons – that could account for the higher sales price.

And that pretty much rounds out my month. Keeping my fingers crossed for March and hoping that these February results weren’t just a flash in the pan!