Stock Photography earnings in October 2018

Another month, another record! October earnings of $3248 marked the 17th consecutive month when my earnings from selling photos and videos online have beaten the same month in the previous year. This is going to be a slightly shorter post than normal as I have just got back from 3 weeks in China and have 4200 photos and 90 videos to process. I can see that this could take the whole of the month to work through and I need to get going!

This month ended up with an increase of almost $500 over the same month in 2017. Not bad going, although I can see from the graph that November and December are going to be tough months. Both were well over $3000 but I am up for a challenge! 

What was striking this month was that video sales were nothing special. If you recall, I had a great video month in September but it pretty much disappeared this month. It just shows how variable earnings can be, and how it is important to spread your assets across different sites and also make sure that you have as many different subjects as possible to meet customer demand each month. I currently have about 390 videos online and so I should expect variability from month to month:

I did continue to add files in October (before I went on my travels) and so I have these total across the main agencies:

And my upload progress was definitely slower, but still solid:

What stood out in October? Shutterstock maintained its $900+recent history with a total of $983. iStock was a little down (September results) with $426 and Adobe maintained some good progress with $487. I was blown away with a $33 sale on Canstock to bring its earnings to $50! Canva was pretty solid with $207. That latter site depends very much on luck I think. If your image gets picked up into a popular design then everyone that uses that design results in a payment back to me. Bit like a pyramid scheme! I’m luck that I have some simple patterns (a tiled floor for instance) that has been incorporated into a template and that sells pretty reliably.

I also followed my own advice by thinking ahead to what is going to be in the news and trying to meet the need for images. This time I thought about the US midterm elections and bought a roll of “I Voted Today” stickers to make about 12 videos and 40 or so photos of the stickers in various forms. So far (and the election is actually today), I have sold $32 worth of images (but no videos) and the stickers cost $12, so I guess that is a bit of a profit. This one is the best seller so far:

Although the profit on these is not great so far, at least they are now in the portfolio with a number of sales so they should be well positioned for upcoming elections. These are not specifically US focused stickers and I did get one sale for a UK version:

So I need to think more about making a series for other country elections using the same props! That is what I mean by trying to anticipate the news and get some new images in your own portfolio.

Finally, I did get one sale in October at FineArtAmerica and a second one early this month, but I will write about those separately. I hope you are seeing some success in your own portfolios as we move into the better selling months of the year!