Stock Photography Review of 2021

A second year without much travel! It’s great to be a travel stock photographer who doesn’t get to go anywhere new, although as I explained in a post last month, capturing images in your hometown might be worthwhile! But in this annual review of my efforts in stock photography, I’ll see if the lack of new imagery impacted my earnings. Spoiler alert – yes…

You have seen this annual chart before, but this shows how 2021 dropped off from the normal trendline:

And this chart shows how the growth in my number of online assets has similarly taken a hit:

In 2020 I worked hard to create some new imagery for the new normal of the coronavirus and struck gold with this image:

This plus the various variants I did with different messages earned around $1600 and really made a great 2020 with $1300 of that in that year. So you can see how quickly it lost momentum. Of course, that is the big issue with RF licensing – once this is in someone’s library, they can continue to use it year after year for no additional fee. I suspect that is what happened here. In 2021, it was harder to think of something new to illustrate the pandemic and so my 2021 best sellers are more often older files. I have to go some way down the list of best sellers to get to an image that was actually created in 2021 and that actually turned out to be a 2020 image that simply had the sky replaced to give it a new lease of life!

Still, those two images have earned about $800 over 2020 and 2021 so I shouldn’t complain!

I did wonder if there had been a reduction in the number of “large” sales? Large is itself a moving feast, and I count large sales as ones that earn more than $10. I can feel older professional photographers turning in their graves with this pittance! But I plotted this out on my graphs and got this:

The blue bars are total earnings in the month, red is from images and then green is the contribution from sales that earned more than $10. I think this does show that 2021 (at least towards the end) has been lower than previous periods, but then there always have been months with relatively few larger earning sales. How about lower amounts of money per download? I don’t track this very well in my system as I don’t record downloads apart from one agency – SS.

This does show a falling trend as we might expect, but at least some of that trend comes from the abysmal performance in January 2021 where the revenue from each download fell down to 50c. I wonder why that was – something to do with the resetting of the levels that occurs in January? That still rankles as one of the worst things that stock agencies have done to their contributor base in my mind.

So what else did I learn from 2021? This is where the money came from in terms of which agencies were the most successful for me?

This shows the impact of the “buyout” that Adobe Stock offered during the year. Made a tremendous difference to my earnings in those months and the year would have been much worse without those! Some of the agencies in the center of the graph no longer exist but my spreadsheet still contains the historic information about them.

I can also use that history to plot out how the different agencies have been doing over the past few years:

This really shows how Adobe has been growing since its early Fotolia days and the buyout of images shows very clearly here.

Keeping up with all this good news (!), here is the average earnings per online file over the years:

I guess the good news is that this isn’t falling as much as it once did!! But it just shows how depressed the earnings have become over the years and why it is so difficult to really get going in stock photography nowadays.

I can split this out between agencies:

One agency doesn’t really like contributors talking about earnings (or at least didn’t in the past), so this one above is just from a big agency.

iStock/Getty is next:

And finally, AdobeStock:

At last – one that was showing some upward movement although there are signs of a levelling of here as well. You can see the impact of the buyout of assets that they implemented this year.

So, I think that is the end of the statistics lesson for today. Bottom line – it is harder to make money from stock photography these days but I will keep trying!