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.
