Year End Review – 2019
2019 has now come and gone and its time to review how the stock business performed during the year. Overall, it was not too bad (and could certainly have been worse) as I ended up with total earnings of $35,595 compared with $35,790 in 2018. I would really have liked to continue with some growth over previous years, but the slow second half of December put paid to that. Here is the trend:
As you can see from the above, things looked pretty bleak in the 2013 – 2016 period so the flat result this year is not that far from the trend, but what I find really interesting is how much of a difference Video made to my results this past year. Looking at the blue trend only, it would have shown a pretty dramatic drop from almost $33K in 2018 to nearly $31K in 2019. Thank goodness I started to upload some videos! The situation through the past few years shows that video impact month by month:
The agencies performed in 2019 pretty much as I would have expected. Here is the overall results for the year by agency:
Shutterstock was far and away my biggest selling agency with almost $11,000 in earnings. Adobe Stock was well behind with $5750 and iStock close behind with $5250. After that, it drops pretty dramatically, down to Alamy (and some old Getty shots from the Corbis days) at $2700, then we fall down to the $1K – $2K level. Even with some of the smaller agencies, they have made a noticeable difference overall – $1000 is not to be sniffed at from companies like Canva, Deposit Photos, EyeEM, Pond5 and even 123RF with $800. I think that reinforces the idea that if uploading to an agency is not difficult (and it isn’t if you use Stock Submitter), then the cumulative income from those sites is well worth while.
I know that my colleague Alex has his turd of the year awards – I think I have quite a few that would qualify. ScanStockPhoto at $2.40, PantherMedia at $5.70 and Zazzle at $9.25. To be fair, it is a long time since I have submitted anything to those agencies and I just left my portfolio in place until I get to a payout (maybe by 2025?). I still submit to Picfair, but as it seems to have earned a total of $12.70 in 2019, I really need to consider if that is worthwhile!
My own stock photo site – BackyardStockPhotos.com did sort of OK – $56 for the year. I plan to put some new images up there as I have some spare disk capacity on my hosting arrangement and see if I can at least cover some of the hosting costs.
My best selling image for the year was a well trusted shot of the Cherry Blossoms in Washington DC with earnings of $614 in the year:
And this one from San Diego with an artificial water surface earned $555:
The best selling video was an opioid shot with the US flag behind which earned $301:
Finally, as far as I can tell, I had at least one sale from 7100 of my portfolio of about 14,000 images during the year. Not sure that is good or bad, but it is one more bit of information from Microstockr Pro!
So far, January has not lived up to my expectations of a good start to the year, but perhaps the second half will make up for the lack of sales in the first!
First half of January is a nightmare. It feels as if we are going into a serious recession.
Yes, I am maybe 30% down on where I would like to be by this stage of the month.
Many thanks for sharing your info. I have similar results but I put my editorial only on Alamy. This means that my Alamy results are as good as Shutterstock, but I obviously lose potential earnings on SS. Agefotostock would be worth looking at very variable, but some months are good. They are a Spanish agency I have been working with for over 8 years … similar to Alamy.
Interesting. it is always a challenge to know whether putting certain images on a specific site makes sense. With my Juul shots, I doubt if I would have got the earnings from Alamy (which tends to be more European focused) that I got from Shutterstock. It is one of those big unknowns!! I’ve heard of Agefotostock – I will check them out. Thanks!