Stock Photography Contributor Sales Report - April 2020

Well, it is time for my April stock revenue report, and it isn’t good, as I speculated last month, the types of photos I upload to stock sites aren’t doing great in the middle of a global pandemic.  However, it isn’t all doom and gloom, but let's just jump into the numbers.

#1. Pexels Donations

The top site on my list this month is Pexels with $63.40 in donations, this is the second month in a row where a free stock site generated more revenue than the traditional paid Microstock sites from the same photos.  This is a lot of revenue to Pexels but I think the reason is that I uploaded a lot of photos in March and April.  

At the start of the Covid lockdown I went into a photo editing and uploading frenzy.  For me, the only thing better than travelling to a new location and taking photos is sitting back with a beer and editing those photos so when this whole thing started, I needed to deal with the stress of everything so ended up with 100 plus new photos for social and stock sites.

So, I used Photerloo to schedule a photo to be posted every other day until the end of June.  However, I can’t use Photerloo to upload to Pexels so as I scheduled those photos to be uploaded to my social and stock sites I put them on Pexels at the same time.  

If you are interested in signing up for a free Photerloo account signup here.

Like many other social sites you will typically see a bump in your numbers as you upload a bunch of photos.  At the time my all time pexels rank was 101st but after these uploads I pushed into the top 100 and right now am at 98th.  So, I think that is why my donations went up by so much.

However, it isn't realistic for me to upload this many quality photos every month, I was working through a backlog of photos taken over a half a year so don’t expect to see $50 plus every month going forward but it would be nice, especially with my revenue from other stock sites in decline.

#2. Shutterstock Contributor Sales

Next on the list is Shutterstock with, now $50 from Shutterstock isn’t bad for me and even a bit above average for this year but $23 of that came from one video sale.  

If I just look at photo sales then I only made $27 which is the lowest revenue from Shutterstock for photos in the past year.  If you take a look at this chart from the Shutterstock contributor website, the red line shows how my image sells from April compared to the past year.  Not great.

However, not sure if you can see the shading in the chart, not sure why Shutterstock uses light blue to show image sales and a slightly darker version of light blue to show video sales but that blue above the red line in April represents my stock video sales.  That is my first video sale in over a year.

Back a number of years ago I went through a phase where I was having a lot of fun with timelapses and uploaded them to the stock sites and they have made a couple of sales over the years but nothing worth noting so before this year I didn’t have much stock footage for sales online.

However, recently I decided I want to learn how to become a better video shooter, so I have been going out early in the morning and shooting some video clips at sunrise and have been uploading them to Shutterstock, Adobe Stock, Depositphotos and Pond5 to see if I would get any downloads and this is my first one.

Personally, I don’t think my video clips are anything special and I have a lot to learn but this one of some birds on the beach caught a buyers attention and earned me $23.  So, pretty happy about that.

#3 & #4. Fine Art America Print Sales and Depositphotos Contributor Sales

Next, I made a sale on a smaller print on Fine Art America that made $21.17 and Depositphotos was $16 which is about average. 

#5. Adobe Stock Contributor Sales

However, 5th on the list was Adobe Stock with only $11, that is really low for me on Adobe stock to give you an idea, here is a chart of my Adobe stock revenue by month over the past year, April was by far the worst month.  I think it is pretty safe to say that drop is related to the coronavirus.

Rest of the stock photography sales

My April 2020 Stock Photography Sales

The rest of the sites were about normal or below normal.  So, not a great month but some bright spots.  As I mentioned in my last video, a lot of my portfolio is travel photos and the travel industry isn’t doing that well right now so it isn’t unexpected to see a drop.

I also created a video about April 2020’s stock photography sales below.

Depositphotos Contributor Earnings Report

In this post I am going to review my earnings on Depositphotos, look at my best selling photos and show some advanced tips and tricks on Depositphotos.  But before I do, if you are looking to learn how to become a deposit photos contributor, I am not going to get into that in this article but I do have another post about getting started as a Depositphotos contributor.

Depositphotos Contributor Earnings by Year

Lets jump into the stats, so far I have made about $1500 on Deposit Photos, now that is a lot less than some of the other stock sites I contribute to like Shutterstock and Adobe stock, so I haven’t spent as much time uploading photos to Depositphotos as a result.  Pretty much just uploaded a bunch of photos 7 years ago and left it.  This chart shows both my earnings and number of uploads by year.

The red line is the number of uploads in that year and the blue bars show the earnings each year.  Notice that in 2012 I uploaded 50 photos but made only 30 cents, 2013, uploaded 141 photos and made under $40.  

I haven’t uploaded a photo since 2014 but in 2019 I made over $300 from those photos I uploaded six years earlier.  Now, I recently uploaded over 100 more photos in 2020 to see if I can raise my 2020 earnings. 

Depositphotos Contributor Earnings Best Days

Looking at the chart, 2017 stands out, no uploads in the preceding two years but more than doubled in revenue. Lets dig into what happened there. 

Looking at my Stats, on June 23, 2017 I made over $60 with 36 on demand sales and on Jul.01, 2017 I made over $120 with 72 on demand sales.  Those two days accounted for almost 40% of my yearly revenue, crazy.

On Depositphotos you can see all your sales so I can go back and see what sold on those days and all those sales were for only one photo.  

There is no way for me to figure out why it happened because I didn’t notice it till afterwards but I figure Deposit photos included my photo in an email campaign or maybe added it to the homepage for those days, that is the only thing I would explain such a sudden increase followed by a decrease.

Depositphotos Contributor Sales by Photo

Now let's take a look at how my sales break out by photo.  One cool thing about Depositphotos is they make it really easy to see a list of your photos with how many people have viewed, downloaded and how much you have earned with each photo.   However, one not so cool thing is they don’t have an easy way to sort the list, so you can’t just click a link to see your top photos.

However, it wasn’t that hard for me to cut and paste into a Google sheet so I could sort by sales.  Now, as you can see, the vast majority of my sales come from one photo.  I uploaded this back in 2012 and it still gets downloaded almost daily.  The main reason is that it ranks high in a lot of search results. 

Buyers searching for just “Canada” in deposit photos are going to see it on the first page and if you type in “Canada Landscape” then it is currently the top result.  

Now search results change over time but fairly slowly.  Now I say this not to brag but to give you an idea of what you can expect if your photo makes it to the top of the search results on this site.

My number two photos are on the first page if you search for “Toronto” definitely not as popular a search as Canada but still give it the number 2 spot on my download list, and the third one is on the first page buyers search for Vancouver.

Depositphotos Contributor Tips

Now if you are reading this article and have never uploaded any of your photos to any stock sites before and this is motivating you  to upload to Depositphotos, that's great but I would suggest not starting selling your photos on Depositphotos, I make a lot more money from the same photos on Adobe Stock and Shutterstock so they are a better place to start if you are new to stock photography.

However, if you have already seen some success on other stock sites then definitely consider opening a Depositphotos account.  But as you know, uploading to sites can be time consuming and adding another site is adding more time to your workflow.

Using Photerloo to Upload to Depositphotos

That is why we created Photerloo, which is a website and Mobile app that uploads your photos to multiple stock sites making it much easier to sell your photos across all the popular sites.  So, you just upload the photo once to Photerloo, the app suggests keywords then uploads it to all your stock sites for you.

If you don’t have a Photerloo account yet, you can click the button below to sign up for a free account..  

Connect Depositphotos Account in Photerloo

If you already have an account then all you need to do is link your deposit photos account.  To do that, click the connect sites links on the left side then click the Depositphotos button and enter Depositphotos username and password, one thing to note is that you can’t link your Depositphotos account until after you have been accepted as a Depositphotos contributor. 

That is, now when you upload to your other stock sites Deposit photos will be available to upload at the same time.

I also posted a Youtube video about my earnings that you can check it as well.