 In this video, I'm going to be looking at what I think is the best way to make money with your photography in 2022. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go through and take a look at my sales from 2021. And then I'm going to compare those to my sales from 2022 so we can kind of see which of the sites are increasing or I'm getting more revenue and where I'm getting less revenue. Then I'm talking a bit about what my plans are for 2022 to increase my photography sales online. Now, if you're new to the channel, let me tell you a bit about my portfolio. I primarily just take photos during my vacation. So I do this as more of a hobby where I make money from it. And then I upload them online. I've been doing this for about 10 years now. So I've got photos online. I've got probably almost a thousand photos on different stock sites uploaded over the past 10 years. Now, last year, I really didn't upload many photos. I actually looked back and I only uploaded three photos in all of 2021. So what I'm going to be going through today, when I talk about my 2021 sales, all of those were photos that were uploaded from previous years. Now, this is actually kind of interesting. So you can actually go through and say, what happens if you have a portfolio on these stock sites and don't upload anything for a year? How is that going to change year to year? Which is actually interesting for me to see because I've never done this before. Typically, I will upload a couple hundred photos every single year. It was just this past year. I was super busy with other things. I still took a lot of photos, but I just didn't actually process them. So really recently, around Christmas time, I took some time off and started going through my photos from the year and I was literally starting in January. So I started to go through January and I am going through it now. I'm kind of catching up, kind of allocating a bit more time to working on my photos. And I'm up to June now. So I will be uploading those more this year, but I just hadn't had a chance to go through and process them. And the ones that I have processed so far, I haven't uploaded yet. So even though I didn't upload many new photos in 2021, I still managed to make $3,500 from my photos. Now, again, these are all photos that I had taken and uploaded to different sites online in previous years. First, let's go take a look at them by month and then we'll take a look at it by site. So if you look at it by month, on average, I'm making $100 to $300 a year, pretty consistently throughout the year, except for October. It really stands out in the list there. The reason was is that in October, I had a company that come to me. And what they do is they have software that has, puts images on screensavers and on your desktop. And they came and they bought 65 photos from me. And I sold them those 65 photos or licenses for those 65 photos for about $1,200. So that was just, you know, a one-off sale, $1,200, but added to the $300 that I already made that month from my other sites. And that's why you see October being so high. So obviously it wouldn't have been a great year for me or I would have been a significantly lower year for me if I hadn't made that one sale. But luckily I did and they found a lot of my photos really useful and I made quite a few sales through that. And one thing to note about that is when we go through and take a look at the sites, that's going to be listed as a smug mug site. But obviously they found my smug mug site, which is souvenirpixels.com. It's my own website. They found that through my social media. So I see a lot of people on this channel making comments, social media isn't worthwhile. Well, you know, I posted social media again. I haven't done it much over this past year. But previously I posted a lot of photos on my social media and it so happened that this year in October, somebody found one of my photos through social media. Through that they found my website. On my website they realized there's a lot of different photos they used and they ended up giving me $1,200 to use 65 of those photos. So there are certain cases that social media can be very useful in generating photo sales, although sometimes it takes some time and they're fewer and far between the stock sites where you get a much smaller amount but much more frequently. So next we'll look at the other sites. You can see that the number two site was Shutterstock. So Shutterstock was my second biggest site for selling my photos after my own website. But it was very close, really like a dollar off from Fine Art America. So I have my photos up on Shutterstock, the same photos for the most part are up on Fine Art America. And I managed to make about $450 from each of those. Followed up by Adobe Stock and Pexels. So Adobe Stock, again, one of the big stock companies, it's always been slightly lower for me than Shutterstock has but it's still a pretty good year for that. And then Pexels. Pexels, people ask for this all the time on the channel but Pexels you give away your photos for free so anybody can use them for free. However, a lot of people will decide to donate. I say a lot is one in a thousand or one in 10,000 but my photos, some of them rank fairly highly in the searches in Pexels. So I get hundreds of thousands, not millions of views on Pexels. So even that small percentage of people that donate it adds up over the year and it ended up being $322 in donations. As you kind of go down there, you'll see kind of the smaller microstock sites as we move along for that different revenue. Now let's take a look at what the change was between 2020 and 2021. I think this is the best indicator of what the sites will potentially be good in 2022 so you can kind of see how they increased year over year. So obviously because of that one big sale that I had on my website, it was the biggest increase and if you took away that sale it probably would have been about the same as it was in 2020 and 2021 would have been about the same. The biggest increase was Adobe Stock at about $100. So again, not a huge increase on that site. Actually Adobe Stock had a fairly, it was much lower for me in 2020. So it kind of just got back up to what it was in 2019 in 2021 and most of that I think was due to their free site. One of the things that Adobe did in 2021 was they basically introduced a free site where you can download photos for free. However, for the photographers you could nominate your photos to be put there and the photographer got paid $5. And I probably made about 20 photos go up onto that free site which equated to about $100 which is why my Adobe Stock went up. Looking at the rest of the sites the kind of major stock size I think the most surprising thing here is that they all increased slightly but the fact that they didn't decrease because if you think about it I didn't upload any photos for an entire year. So what I would have expected was a more of a decrease in the sales on the sites but they stayed about the same or increased slightly. I think that's because of COVID I think my sales were lower in 2020 already because of COVID. And so maybe because COVID lightened up and there was a bit more traveling going on in 2021 they increased by a little bit but then obviously decreased by a little bit because they didn't upload photos. And so just stayed about the same. So no huge shifts here in the changes. You can kind of see that for the most part I'm making about the same now as I was then. The one big one here is FreePick. FreePick I don't really use it anymore. It was kind of like in 2020 I uploaded photos there for a couple of months and I made like $100 in a couple of months which looked really good but after that it went really downhill FreePick. Another thing with FreePick is that I filled out a number of forms to get verified to get paid and they came back and asked me for additional paperwork. I don't know how to get this paperwork. I've asked for their support team for help. I can't get the paperwork so I can't even withdraw my earnings because they're asking for tax forms that my country doesn't seem to give out and it's just not worth the hassle. So FreePick did go way down. I'm no longer uploading photos to FreePick. It just seems they're very difficult. And again, people warned me about this on the channel when I started uploading there and I got some good results. But as it turns out those comments to Ryder probably shouldn't have went in there but that's how you learn, right? By making the mistake. So I won't be uploading there anymore. I also saw a bit of a decrease in pexels but it was still pretty high in the list as you can see from before us. There just wasn't quite as many uploads. I think that really just has, is mainly due to the fact that pexels probably prioritizes newer photos more, right? If you look at something like Shutterstock they're gonna rank your photos high in the search engine because if they've been sold in the past I've got lots of photos that have been sold in the past whereas pexels because there's not sales on there they're always wanting to show new content. And so they're a newer site as well too. So probably because I didn't upload any photos there that's why that revenue went down. So obviously the next big question is what are my new plans for 2022? So the first thing is I'm really, I want to get back into processing my photos not uploading my photos, installing them online. As I mentioned in the start, I'm kind of behind on that but I have been catching up throughout January. I'm up to June now. I really do want to be processing the rest of the year. I took a ton of photos over the summer. I did a lot of traveling over the summer and so I've got a ton of photos to process. So it'll take me a while to get through them within the next couple of months. I want to process those, get them online, get them on the different stock sites, okay? However, I'm going to be doing things a bit differently this year. Like when I go through and I look at the sales of my photos, most of the photos that I sold in 2021 were photos that I took more than five years before. And my top photo, this photo here they'll all pull up. It is my top photo every year. It's been my top photo every year for the past five years and I took it in 2012. So it's 2022. It's a 10-year-old photo and it's consistently been my best photo, right? And I can go out and take much better photos now that I was in 2012. In 2012, I had an entry-level DSLR camera that I was taking the photos with. Now I've got a significantly better camera because that's why I use my stocks sales to purchase. So there's a better camera. I'm better at processing. I'm better at taking photos but I don't think I can match that photo. The reason is is that the way the stock sites work right now is they really prioritize photos with past sales. So it's much better to have a photo that was uploaded in 2012 that was an average photo than to upload a really good photo in 2022. And that 2012 photo, because it's been sold thousands of times over the past 10 years, it will rank higher in the search engines on sites like Shutterstock and because it ranks higher, more people will buy it than going up and uploading a photo now. Now there's obviously some exceptions to this. It is still possible to get into the stock industry. It's just a lot more work now than it was before. And the reason is is because back then there weren't as many photos on these sites. There was a lot less competition, a lot more demand to buy the stock sites because these were microstock sites it was something that was new. And these sites were growing much more quickly. But if you look at Shutterstock and Getty these days, they're growing at an average of five to 10% a year, right? And so every new photo you upload, you're kind of fighting for that extra five or 10% with a large number of other people. It's just the market has got much more mature now than it was 10 years ago. So what I really want to focus on in 2022 is looking for kind of new ways and new creative ways to sell my photos online and kind of to make money for my photography. The thing I'm really starting to realize too with the stock photography market is that it really has kind of stagnant as become a mature market. And there's not a lot of innovation happening anymore. You know, if I look at, you know, what happened with my stock photos or the things that were happening with stock photo sites between 2012 and 2017, there was a lot of changes going on. You know, a lot of increases. I was seeing the month-to-month year over year. The stock sites were changing. Everybody, there was very competitive market. But what's happened now is you kind of got the big players like Getty, you know, Shutterstock, Adobe stock and they're just making incremental improvements. And you know, other sites are trying to pop up. You know, we did have some success with, you know, Pixabay and Upsplash and the free sites, but they just all ended up getting pot out by the bigger players anyways. So it just really seems that everything stagnated. And it wasn't that way back in 2012 when I started. But really from 2017 to 2021, there hasn't really been a lot of changes. I think kind of the industry is really due for some innovation, right? Buyers, you know, aren't very happy. You know, they're somewhat happy I would say with the stock sites, you know, there's advantages and disadvantages. I would say in general, you see a lot of photographers aren't happy with them. So you've got, you know, lukewarm happy customers or buyers, you've got unhappy photographers. I think there's kind of better ways that are gonna come out and there will be more innovation going forward in this industry. And that's what I wanna, you know, focus on. Because the reason that I'm getting, these still getting sales from 2012 is because I uploaded my photos earlier on and then I've just been making revenue from 10 years. I wanna kind of look forward and say, where is the growth gonna be going forward? And I'm gonna try to get and sell my photos that way. And for me, what I'm looking at is NFTs and blockchain technology. I've kind of really, you know, doubled down on doing a lot of learning over the past month. That's like one of the reasons why I've been so busy. And so I'm over the course of 2022, what I'm really gonna be focusing on is finding new ways to sell my photos primarily with NFTs. So I actually have been experimenting with selling my photos as NFTs since past March and I haven't had a lot of success. I think the reason that I haven't had a lot of success is there's not a lot of NFT, well, there's really no NFT marketplaces set up that are really focusing on stock photography or stock photography buyers, right? So, you know, NFTs, the way they're set up right now and I've talked about this before in the channel, they're really set up for collectors, right? Nobody, people don't wanna collect my photos. As you can see, people do want to license my photos. And there's no licensing NFTs out there. And I, well, not that I've been able to find, if you know of any, let me know in the comments, okay? Now, you know, one of the good things though, is that I know it's not out there right now, but I totally see that it's possible to create. And, you know, photography is my hobby and selling my photography as stock is my hobby, but my profession is software developer. However, I'm not a blockchain developer. I can't build NFTs or I couldn't build NFTs, I guess maybe I should say. Because one of the reasons that I was so busy in the second half of last year, was around learning blockchain technology and NFTs. And I actually between September to December, I went and I got a certification on blockchains, learned how to become a blockchain developer. And now I'm actually a certified blockchain developer. And as part of that, I'm actually working on an NFT that can be licensed. So my plan for 2022 is to go ahead, you know, create an NFT where people can go through and license my photos through an NFT. And then sell my photos directly to people, very slimmer to the way that I do on my SmugMug website. And I really feel that this is probably a better model going forward for selling photos. And, you know, I foresee it growing. I don't foresee, you know, NFTs totally taking over the tariff industry and killing Shutterstock, but you foresee that it will gradually be a better way to license photos and it will take market share around from Shutterstocks and the getty images of the world. And if I can get in early, like I did with the stock companies, you know, 10 years ago, you know, I think there's gonna be more growth in selling your photos or licensing your photos as NFTs, then there will be just sticking with the regular companies. So that's why I'm really gonna be focusing my time on in 2022. This is also probably gonna influence the way that I, you know, post videos on this channel. You know, in the second half last year, as I got busy with my course and learning and working on the licenseable NFT, I really didn't have as much time to focus on videos. I haven't done one since I think September. And even before that, I was really just doing one video a month going over my stock sales and I kind of felt like they were getting a bit boring. So I will still post photos like this, talking about my stock sales or talking about interesting things that happen, but I probably won't do it every month. I think I'll probably do it once a quarter. So I'll do maybe four of these a year where I'm going through and just kind of looking at my stock sales. And I plan on doing a lot more content on NFTs, you know, selling my photos as NFTs, setting up NFTs, kind of some of the work that I'm doing the results of that. So just, you know, as far as the channel goes, that's going to be a change in 2022. There's going to be a lot more NFT focus. And, you know, you may have actually found this photo. If you started following me in 2021, it's most likely that you actually found me through my NFT videos. I did one NFT video back in March and it was by far the most popular video of the year for me. So I know a lot of you are actually looking into this, the same things I am. So I'm going to be talking about a lot more, you know, that interest to you. Make sure you subscribe to the channel because we will be kind of focusing on that over 2022. Anyways, I hope you found this somewhat useful and as always best of luck selling your photos online.