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:

Earnings from selling photos and videos online via stock photography agencies and microstock websites in November 2020
Historical earnings from stock photography through November 2020

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:

Fort Martin power station near Morgantown

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!

How many stock photos and videos did I upload in November 2020
Upload of new assets to stock agencies

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

Number of photos and videos that you need on a stock agency to make serious money
Number of photos and videos 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:

Exercising on the deck of a cruise ship

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!

Earnings from assets created and uploaded to stock agencies in 2020
Earnings from new assets created and uploaded in 2020

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:

Heinz field in Pittsburgh sold as a metal print

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:

History of earnings from selling stock photos on Canva
History of earnings 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:

Earnings from selling video clips on the main stock agencies
Historical earnings from selling video clips

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!

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4 Responses

  1. former shutterstocker says:

    I just saw this on you tube posted by a stock photographer who’s videos I sometimes watch. It says he got a warning from SS that publicly disclosing your earnings from SS is against their terms of service and you can be banned for it??? I never heard of that. If it’s true there are a lot of people who are going to get banned. I hope this is some kind of scam e-mail this poor guy got, but it wouldn’t surprise me. If it’s true, then one more reason to add to the long list of why I’m glad I quit SS. Have you ever heard of this policy?

    https://www.youtube.com/post/UgyTAXfIICHHLWigUr14AaABCQ

    • Steven Heap says:

      I do recall this from way back when they went public and it was positioned as not giving market sensitive information out. I don’t try to be anything other than factual about them (and I’ll probably start being less specific going forward now you have reminded me)

  2. former shutterstocker says:

    I hope I didn’t encourage you to change in any way. That wasn’t my intent. I was just trying to see if they are in fact as big a douche-bags as I thought they were, which I think I’ve confirmed. There are tons of people who do these monthly earnings reports on youtube. That’s how I got into it to begin with. I started uploading to SS because I saw one of the youtubers that gave specific info about their earnings and decided to give it a try. I did pretty well on SS for the few months I was there, which means SS did pretty well from me also, so it doesn’t do them any favors to take down those earnings reports.

    That link I posted above also points out another fact about the stock industry, or at least those based in the US, which is racism. That guy is in India and he’s posted about several problems he’s had like this and as far as I can see they choose to enforce their “rules” with people in “third world” countries much more than in US. That’s because they know those people don’t have resources to go to court or whatever.

    • Steven Heap says:

      I do keep this in mind when I am writing my blogs and I do keep details to a minimum about Shutterstock in case they take a stronger line. So the reminder was fine. I didn’t watch the clip (in fact I’m not sure it was still there). It could be that SS takes that line with overseas contributors – the US has a strong history of freedom of speech in the constitution, and while I believe is within their rights to enforce a contractual term (which this is), they maybe don’t think it is worth the hassle to enforce it unless someone is really bad mouthing them.

I'm always interested in what you think - please let me know!