What sells best – Editorial or Commercial stock photography?
I was asked about a month ago, whether I knew what the financial performance of my stock portfolio was when you consider editorial work separately from commercial images and videos. Great question, but I have struggled to answer it!
The first issue is that Microstockr Pro does not have an easy way to distinguish between the two types of upload. Although all my editorial images would have a city/state and date in the description, searching for those terms (which are different for the majority of my editorial work as the locations and dates obviously change, and it didn’t seem possible to search for a “:” that I include in most. So, a search didn’t work for me. I asked Taras Kushnir of xpiks and he posted an analysis today on his blog that uses my portfolio at Shutterstock and Adobe to try to answer the question. Please check that out to see the analysis he undertook.
But this still bugged me and other sites (particularly Alamy and iStock) accept editorial work and Pond5 is obviously a key agency for editorial videos. So, over the past month, I have been eyeballing all my best sellers using Microstockr Pro and adding ones that I think are (or should be) editorial images and videos into a collection. Bearing in mind that I am looking at a page of 160 thumbnails at a time and I have 126 pages of images that have sold at least once, you can imagine that this took some time!
In the end, I started with the highest earners and went through the first 44 pages until the total earnings of the remaining images were less than $5 each. I checked over 33% of the pages, but probably looked at over 95% of the earnings I would estimate.
Overall Earnings on Editorial stock images and videos
On to the results! This is the first graph showing editorial earnings over time from each agency:
That looks pretty good – although you can’t see the total in this chart, it is $25,239 from 25,287 downloads. But how does this compare with total earnings over the same period. I clearly didn’t do much (any?) editorial work in the early years, but my total earnings from all images and videos have been $330,908 with 406,376 downloads! That shows that 92% of my earnings came from commercial work and just 8% from editorial. If I just look at video on its own, total earnings have been $23,200 of which $3,177 was editorial. Interestingly, this is almost 14% of my video income coming from editorial videos.
What about earnings per download? The earnings per download for commercial photos has been $0.75 and for editorial work $0.87.
Editorial photos versus editorial stock video
Now a couple of graphs of photos separate from videos:
Best-selling editorial stock photos and videos
And to round this out, this is what Microstockr Pro shows as the best sellers within this editorial collection:
As I suspected, I was very early in the field with images of Juul vaping systems having bought a kit in Heathrow airport before a flight back to the USA. At that time, there were perhaps 30 images on Shutterstock and I probably had 25 of them. Then the whole field blew up with investigations of them marketing to kids and then various lawsuits. Just shows, once again, how important it is to be always thinking of the next big thing!
Conclusions
You can’t make much just concentrating on editorial images and videos although taking simple editorial photos wherever you visit can make a big difference to your earnings without much effort! However, there is one big missing factor here – what percentage of my current portfolio is editorial? I can’t seem to find a way to find this out unfortunately. Taras estimated this at 15% using Shutterstock but the total he had when we did an earlier analysis was about 10,000 images. I now have 15,000 at Shutterstock. So, perhaps that is my next task – to try to extend this analysis work with a better estimate of the size of my editorial portfolio!
Thank you for sharing. Indeed very useful information. How to you catalogue editorial images on microstockr and calculate the revenue? I, recently , put an editorial tag on the file name in order to be able to catalogue editorial images and then calculate the revenue, but i did not find a way to catalogue an calculate previous editorial earnings.
It was hard work! You can create a collection for editorial images and then search for any items that might help identify an image as editorial. But Microstockr only knows about information that it pulls down from the agencies, which does not include the file name. It is often different for different agencies – Deposit Photos seems to have a different title that anything I have uploaded for some reason. So I tried to pick up as many images as I could with a search for various place names that might be in the editorial description (or years in the date that is usually required) and then I started eyeballing each page of best sellers to find more images to add. You can also right click an image and add to a collection that way, so you can add new sales as you see them.
I have noticed that Getty licenses most of my editorial photos. I have done more of it recently, it’s something AI cannot recreate.
Yes, that might be the only way to succeed in the future!