Stock Photography Earnings – November 2020

What a business this is. Last month I had a record for earnings, this month I am over $1000 down from that total. Such is the stock photography business in 2020. The month started reasonably well with some biggish sales, but seemed to drop off a cliff after that first week. As a result, my earnings for the month turned out to be $2785. Of course, I know that is still a very solid month compared to earlier ones in the year, but still a bit disappointing. Here is my usual graph:

As you can see, November this year is the lowest total for the past four years.

Upload Activity

November was actually a slow month for me in terms of creating new content. The weather was actually quite pleasant locally and so I did create some new drone images and videos and the leaves turned, one of which sold almost immediately on Shutterstock for a reasonable amount:

I don’t think my drone (DJI Mavic 2 Pro) has paid for itself yet, but it is still good fun to capture new views of places. In the month I only created and upload about 50 assets, which is well down on my normal activity, although looking at this next graph, it seems to be the norm for this unusual year!

And here are my counts of assets on the main agencies:

What happened in November?

The month started with a bang with total sales on the 5th November of $240! This was driven by the sale of a video on Shutterstock which earned quite a lot of money! This 4K video has been a bit of a sleeper as it has only sold three times (for $3.40 on Getty!) before this massive sale. But it is interesting and very gratifying to see it get recognized:

After that week went by, things just went quiet and most days I was lucky to reach $50 in sales, which I normally think as the lowest I expect to see during the week days. As I have mentioned before, I was very successful this year at coming up with new ideas for content that really caught on, and I was creating those images before the demand really took off, and hence I got higher up the search order. My graph of sales of assets created and uploaded in 2020 shows how successful that has been during the summer and what a drop occurred in November, although I need to make clear that the previous months now include the Getty/iStock sales of those new assets. Getty has been perhaps $130 a month on average but this is one thing that Microstockr Pro can’t show – the contribution of different agencies within a collection of images. I must remember to ask them to think about including that!

However you look at it, creating new images and earning over $5000 from them in their first year is something that I am pretty pleased with. As I have said before – it shows you can still have some success in this business if you have the right concepts and approach.

I had a lot of sales from Coronavirus and also US election themes and of course that election finished (well, sort of) at the beginning of the month. I have also noticed that with the RF licensing model, companies can download an image and then use it as many times (and over any timeframe) that they want. And so that would tend to result in images doing well for a time and even though the stories continue, the companies involved are using the same image again and again rather than buying a new and different one. I see my images appear on Motley Fool every time they write about cable TV subscriptions, but there are rarely any new sales of those or similar images. I think it is the same now with the virus and election ones – how many different images do they need? I wish I had more opportunity to do vaccine shots, but I don’t have access to the right components for that, but my efforts on more generally illustrating those themes have really paid off.

Fine Art Activities

I keep plugging away at my fine art sale opportunities. I’ve been up and down with pricing on Fine Art America, but I got no sales during the period where I went very low with my pricing, so as an experiment that told me that maybe people are not very price sensitive. I have a new scheme now where the smallest size print is priced at a low point so that people see that when the thumbnails appears, but I have raised the prices of the larger sizes. I have no idea if it is linked, but then I got a sale of a metal print which earned $97 this month:

This was a 36×24 inch metal print and my previous pricing would have resulted in a profit of over $200. Who knows if the buyer would have paid more – one of the mysteries of life!

Society6 came in with sales on various products of $45 and I opened an account at Redbubble to try that. I only have five images there so far, as I find each of these sites is quite heavy in effort involved in uploading each image.

Agency Performance

As usual Shutterstock was the highest earner with a reasonable amount, obviously helped by that enormous video sale. It would have been a pretty poor month without that one. Adobe was down a lot as well from $676 last month to $486 this. However, iStock has been growing month by month recently (probably with all the election/virus shots) and earned $639 in October sales reported in November. The biggest fall was undoubtedly EyeEM which had a great $138 last month and dropped to $18 this month. And Canva was a massive disappointment for me after six months of $298 earnings, it fell to $114. I’m not really surprised – I don’t do the sort of work that I imagine designers on Canva are looking for – backgrounds, textures, festive scenes for Christmas designs etc. My travel stuff is of less interest to them, and I doubt if many wanted an election image. For interest, here is my history on Canva:

Dreamstime continues to achieve $100+ earnings, helped by an image of a blank social security card. I changed the title of it on the site to explain it was not suitable for creating your own social security card, but I do wonder if some people are actually trying to do that! Apart from that, most sites were just lower in November than they were in October!

Video Sales

I had high hopes from video sales but they seem to be dropping in price and volume along with imagery. Apart from the one big sale I mentioned, things have been pretty quiet there. Here are my historical earnings from video:

So that is a run through of my results from November. To be honest, I am not expecting much more in December – I can’t hope for Getty to stay at the levels it has reached and Canva is now at its new run level. But things are as they are!