Welcome back to the September 2021 detailed monthly report during these increasingly strange and desperate times. Hope your stock business isn’t proving to be too much of a tough climb…

If you’re interested to see how I did in my August 2021 earnings, click here. In fact, you can see all my earnings going as far back to February 2019! Blood, sweat and tears spilled over these digital pages…more frustration than joy to be honest but I have no choice but to keep going!

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Golden Turd Normination is back!

Read until the end as you’ll have a chance to nominate the Golden Turd of the Month Agency! But before we get started….

Buy me a Beer!

Throughout my blog, as you can appreciate, I’ve given quite a bit of my time to help you make sense of this complicated stock industry and focus on making money. I’ve also given away earnings info on some of my best-sellers which will directly lead to those images reducing their value (how much is impossible to say but suffice to say that copycat thieves may be lurking). In addition to the risk of those corporate clowns at Shutterstock shutting down my account for disclosing my sales on there. You may also notice that I REFUSE to run annoying ads!

If you feel that the information below and throughout the blog is useful I kindly ask you to donate as much as you feel is reasonable, such a price of a beer, by clicking on the following link below:

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Check out the Interview with Abigail Miles, Veteran Book Cover Photographer at Arcangel Images!

Interview with Abigail Miles, Veteran Book Cover Photographer at Arcangel Images

Now, onto the meat of this report, my detailed earnings…with the slower summer period over and dusted, I fully hope that sales will pick up but in this business nothing is certain…

First for stills….

Detailed Earnings

Agency	Number of Images in port (added September)	Net Revenue for September (US$)	Avg Return Per Download (US$)
123RF	5,021 (0)	5	0.28
Alamy	12,862 (14)	220	22
Arcangel	1,040 (8)	158	158
Adobe Stock	3,560 (8)	56	0.88
Bigstock	3,870 (0)	3	0.25
Creative Market	1,519 (0)	0	0
DepositPhotos	6,623 (0)	16	0.42
Dreamstime	6,867 (0)	9	0.65
EyeEm	277 – (Partner)	0	0
Fine Art America	690	0	0
iStock (August)	6,928 (0)	98	0.85
Robert Harding (Q2 2021 monthly average)	384 (0)	5	1
Shutterstock Editorial	857 (0)	0	0
Shutterstock	10,726 (4)	170	0.62
Pond5	1,746 (5)	2	2
Picfair	5,632 (0)	0	0
Photo4Me	327 (0)	0	0
SignElements	1,214 (0)	2	N/A
Wirestock	1,207 (29)	3	1
Direct Sales	N/A	0	0
Total		751

Moving swiftly onto clips…

Agency	Number of clips in port (added September)	Net Revenue for September (US$)	Avg Return Per Download (US$)
Adobe Stock	385 (0)	0	0
Pond5	1,497 (7)	66	66
iStock	180 (0)	2	2
Shutterstock	1,143 (-1)	20	6
Total		88

Totals: $839 in September vs $886 in August

Looking at the long-term (major agencies):

Now, as usual, lets break it down with results for the major agencies:

Second to Best-Month-Ever at Alamy!

Patience has finally paid off and September over at unpredictable Alamy produced a spectacular second to best-month-ever at $220/net on a surprisingly few number of downloads – only ten! Nevertheless, I fully expect Alamy to produce a sub $50 month in October lol

It’s really nice to report that Alamy was my best-selling agency and has beaten Shutterstock. In fact, it’s the second month in a row that Shutterstock wasn’t the top agency (Adobe Stock won in August).

Here were some of the best-sellers:

Adobe Stock, predictably back to its average

After Round 3 of Adobe Stock’s free-downloads selection, sales predictably tumbled towards the yearly average at $56. No worries about that, just hope there is a Round 4 on the freebie giveaway. Nevertheless, my month’s best-sellers were the following.

Cool to spot the top image being used as the background in the following site. I wrote about this rare model-released lifestyle shoot I did in Milan a few years back here.

iStockPhoto – continued disappointment…

Another disappointing month at only $98 with half the month’s earnings coming from just one image.

Shutterstock – average month

Continued new normal average month for me at Shutterstock at a total of $170 for stills at a 62cents/download and 4 clips sold for $20. Best-sellers included:

Just one nice sale at Pond5

Although volumes at Pond5 are usually low, the average earned prices are quite interesting. In September, just one sold earning me $66, and guess which one….

The holy-grail night sky timelapse, which is quickly becoming my best-seller. I checked over at Shutterstock and it’s never sold…so as you can see from breakdown table (-1) I removed it and uploaded it via Wirestock for perhaps better luck…

Testing my GoPro

On my back and forths between Lisbon and Madrid, I’ve been testing my GoPro on the dashboard of my friend’s car. One clip in particular, once accepted (SS giving grief about “noise”), should result in some sales.

This clip was captured literally crossing the border between Portugal and Spain. Not exciting but relevant for many themes related to free movement of goods / people in the Schengen area. In addition, as this stretch of border-crossing was practically closed off during the worst of the Covid pandemic, if/when a variant mutation does strike again I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s shut down again and the content may feature heavily…

Uploading Cell-Phone pics

While we’re on the topic of experimental content, I recently captured an interesting scene in central Madrid of a homeless couple sleeping at a doorway while diners enjoyed themselves next door. Since I didn’t have my wide angle lens (only a 70-300mm), I couldn’t capture it…but instead pulled out my iPhone10 and captured this shot.

Extremely noisy, etc but most agencies have surprisingly accepted it! I’ll try to go back to that scene soon…

Arcangel – 8 Images Accepted (100+ uploads)!

One sale to report at Arcangel for this image, which earned me $158. It’s a repeat sale, hence the beauty of the Rights-Managed model (one payment for each usage vs one payment of multiple usages under the Royalty-Free model).

Nevertheless, Arcangel continues to drive me crazy with the sheer number of rejections. Some encouraging advice from Abigail has helped though…particularly the need to use models.

Here were the 8 accepted in September:

Looking at the big picture – $$$$

Reiterating what I mentioned last month, I must keep reminding myself that even though my portfolio on there is just over 1,000, since starting to contributor to Arcangel about 4 years ago I’ve earned a total of $4,147 net on 16 sales for an average of $259/download, for the following titles:

Payment Date	Book Title
Jul-18	Mramor a Platno by Storey Stephanie – Czech Rep
Jul-18	Quai des enfers by Ingrid Astier – France
Sep-18	L’occhio dell’inferno by James Rollins – ITALY
Sep-18	The Mercy Seat by Elizabeth Winthrop – US
Dec-18	Sentieri 3e (Text Book) – US
Aug-19	Bis zum Bitteren Ende by Nicci French – GERMANY
Aug-19	Nero a Milano by Romano DeMarco – ITALY
Dec-19	Les Sept sœurs by Lucinda Riley – FRANCE
Mar-20	The Paris Children by Gloria Goldreich (ARC) – US
Mar-20	Angels Weep by Colin Falconer – UK
Jun-20	Milano a Mano Armata by Romano De Marco (eBook Only) – ITAL
Jun-20	The Paris Children by Gloria Goldreich – US AUDIO
Jul-20	The Paris Children by Gloria Goldreich – WEL
Oct-20	Nero a Milano by Romano DeMarco (Digital Audio) – ITALY
Oct-20	Those Who Are Saved by Alexi Landau – NA
Jun-21	Brèves de comptoir, Tournée générale by Jean-Marie Gourio – FR
Sept-21	The Paris Children by Gloria Goldreich – GERMANY

All is not lost since the rejects (minus accepted similars) shall go to Wirestock to be distributed throughout the micros. For instance, this one was rejected at Arcangel and spotted today that it sold to a Christianity blog.

Hey, that’s my pic!

Spotted 7 of my pics here used in various publications…

Golden Nugget of the month

How times have changed…a few months ago I was cussing at Alamy for producing such few sales (together with a few Golden Turd Nominations) and now I’m awarding them the Gold Nugget of the Month!

You Nominate the Golden Turd of the Month

We’re back and again you will nominate your Golden Turd of the Month Agency!

Until next month…

About Alex

I’m an eccentric guy, currently based in Madrid, Spain, on a quest to visit all corners of the world and capture stock images & footage, when things go back to normal (Late-2021??). I’ve devoted eight years to making it as a travel photographer / videographer and freelance writer (however, had recently go back into full-time office work to make ends meet, although happy to report that it’s coming to an end soon). I hope to inspire others by showing an unique insight into a fascinating business model.

I’m proud to have written a book about my adventures which includes tips on making it as a stock travel photographer – Brutally Honest Guide to Microstock Photography