 Alright, in this video I'm going to be talking about the best sites to sell your photography for 2023. I'm going to do this by going back and looking at my revenue from all the different sites I've got my photos on from 2022. Well, and then we'll also take a look at some of the trends that I've seen. So we'll go back and we'll compare 2022 to 2021, see which sites increased or decreased. And then we'll also go take a look at all my sales and all the sites over the past four years and see how they all rack up together. Through this, I think you'll get a pretty good understanding of which sites are increasing as far as the revenue goes and which ones are decreasing. So you know which ones to focus on over the next year. After that, I'll go through and we'll talk about what my plans are for this year and how I'm going to be trying to make some more money selling my photos online. Now I know it's been a long time since I posted a video. I want to apologize for that. First off, thanks to all of you who reached out to me and asked me how things were going. It wasn't that anything was going badly. I actually had a really great year last year, but it was just that I just got really busy. Unfortunately, making these videos is one of the things that kind of gets cut when I'm too busy doing other work and items related to my photography as well as my software development. Again, I'd like to say that I'm going to try to post more this year, but I said the same thing last year. It didn't really work out, but I am hoping to be able to carve out more time to do these videos more regularly this year than I did over the past year. Also, another thing to note is that I did not upload a lot of photos last year either. That was another thing that I just didn't have time for. When we're looking at these stats, for the last couple of years, I haven't been uploading as regularly as I used to. When you look at the stats, think that there's not a lot of new photos being added. These are my old photos that are getting sold. You can kind of see if a site went up, it wasn't because I put more photos on there. It's probably because that site is more popular or that site is better for selling your photos. First, let's look at the revenue by site. My best site or my highest revenue by site was Pexels and Pixabay. I put them together this year on the list because they are kind of owned by the same company and they are free sites. Now, I get asked this a lot, so I'll kind of go through it. Pexels and Pixabay, I've uploaded my photos there and anybody can download them from free. However, when they download them, they're prompted to give a donation. And a lot of people do give donations. And if I take a look here at almost $600 worth of donations, I got in 2022. And that was actually my highest site, so I made more money giving my photos away for free. Then I did selling them on Shutterstock or Adobe stock. Now, one of the things to note about these free sites is that you need to get a lot of downloads to get a small number of donations. So to give you an idea, I went and checked and I'm getting about 100,000 downloads every month. Okay, so every month, my photos are getting 100,000 downloads. Now, that was only on Pexels, but I get most my donations through Pexels. So that's probably the more popular of the two sites. And so every month, 100,000 people download. And I maybe get five to 10 different donations. So it is a very small percentage. So I know some people have mentioned, oh, I uploaded 10 photos and they got a couple hundred downloads and no donation. So I take them off. Well, you're not really getting to scale when you do that. You need to kind of, if you look at me, I'm getting about 100,000 downloads. What you can actually do is Pexels, one of the things about Pexels is they'll show you the stats. So you can actually go, I'll put a link down in the description to my, you know, my Pexels profile, and you can go in there and take a look at the stats for yourself, right? So again, I've got a very large number of views. I'm actually, I think, 44th all-time on Pexels. So because I started early, I got my photos up there earlier, I'm kind of high on the list and obviously take a lot if you were starting today to catch up to that. But that being said, I don't have a lot of photos up there and there aren't as many, as much competition on Pexels as there is on a site like Shutterstock or Adobe Stock. So, you know, I think you would be better off uploading your photos to Pexels now. Typically, then you'll be for Shutterstock and Adobe Stock. However, I do upload the same photos to most, right? To both of them. Now, you might think that people, you know, if I upload a photo to Pexels, then nobody would buy that photo on a Shutterstock. That's definitely not the case, okay? Pexels and Shutterstock have very different markets and the people that go to Pexels aren't typically, you know, going to Shutterstock. They're looking for free photos and to give a donation, a small donation, they'll just go to Pexels. If they have a subscription to Shutterstock, they go to Shutterstock. I don't think there's a lot of people out there going, oh, I see this photo on Shutterstock. I wonder if it's on Pexels. People just don't have that amount of time. So, I don't think it really hurts my other sales and it just adds up. And again, it was my largest site and it has been increasing year over year for quite a while now. Now, the next on the list is Fine Art America. Most of my photos I take during vacations and a lot of them are like landscape photos. So, I have them on Fine Art America where basically people can go through and buy prints. And I do make a fair number of sales and that was my second highest site of the year. It's just selling prints on Fine Art America. Again, some of the other sites, I haven't uploaded there recently, but I've got some photos up there. I think what happens with those is people go traveling someplace, they come back, they want a photo to remember their travels and they find them. Some of the photos that I sell up there, they're not great photos, I don't think, but they're unique photos, right? Photos that maybe they don't have a lot of other content there. So, if you're looking for a specific place, they can find it on Fine Art American, they can purchase my photos and they purchased them as prints. And I get a fairly large sums, 10 to 60 or $70 as opposed to Shutterstock whereas normally a couple of cents each sale. Next is Shutterstock and Adobe Stock there. That's pretty normal for them. Typically a number of years ago, five, six years ago, Shutterstock and Adobe Stock would be the top but they've definitely been going down over the years as they get more and more saturated and there's more and more competition on those. One of the things to note about this is I had a really bad year from my website. If you take a look at my website, I didn't make very many sales. Compared to last year, we'll see on the next slide more. I typically make a lot more. So that was one thing that I found that I saw a pretty big drop and it's probably because I haven't been focusing on my social media. Most of my sales on my website come, people see me on social media and then I'm coming over to my website but if I don't post on social media, I'm not getting the coverage. So I'm not gonna get the sales on the website. Next, let's look at the revenue change between 2021 and 2022. Now the first thing that jumps out is just what I mentioned. My smug mug website, a huge decrease. However, one of the things to note is that in 2021, I got a sale that was like $1,100 from one company. So although I did see a decrease, it looks a lot worse than it is because that was one sale, one less sale, lost $1,000. And I typically don't get $1,000 sales each year. So I would have expected myself, you'd ask me at the start of 2022, I probably would have expected to get maybe about $400 in sales from my website. So it did still go down a lot more than that, but it wasn't as bad as it looks here. One of the things to note too is you can take a look, Pexels and Pixabay went up. Although I didn't upload photos, again, they are increasing and I've seen that for a while now. And you can see Shutterstock and Deposit photos are decreasing by almost exactly the same amount. So although I'm making less money on the paid sites, I'm actually making more money on the free sites. Next, let's take a look at my sales from 2019 to 2022, okay? So this is four years worth of sales stacked on top of each other. So the way you can read this bar chart is you can just kind of see green is 2019, yellow 2020, red 2021 and blue 2022, right? So what you can see is the total over those number of years. And it's actually quite interesting because you can kind of see that Final America, Shutterstock, Smugmug and Pexels and Pixabay are all around the $2,000 mark, right? You can see like, for example, Smugmug, although I had a really bad year this year, last year I had a great year and other years were average, right? So over the four years, those sites have been about the same. And you can kind of see from the trending that I would expect that if I did a five-year trend next year, probably Pexels and Pixabay is gonna be a couple of spots up, probably pool pass, Shutterstock and Shutterstock and Adobe Stop will keep moving down. Final America has been pretty consistent over the years, okay? So this just kind of gives you an idea of, you know, what it would look like as far as your sales go if you were starting out today. Now, obviously most of the photos that were sold up there, I shot in between 2012 and 2016. So a lot of them have been up there for a while. It's much harder to get into selling your photos online today than it was back then. However, you know, I still think I would still focus on these websites, right? So I think of my own website to sell, selling Final America, Shutterstock, Pexels and then Adobe Stock. Obviously there's some of them here that just have been over-declined which I probably wouldn't upload as many to anymore. One to three or half can stock photo, you know, 500 PX. There was a time where 500 PX, I was making like a thousand or $2,000 a year back in, you know, 2014, 15 around then but they really went downhill. They changed their business model and now it's like a really small amount. So I definitely wouldn't spend a lot of time selling my photos on 500 PX or some of those ones on the end down there. One of the things to note too is that I have never had much luck with Alamy but I think, but I've heard that a lot of other people do. I think it depends on the type of photos you shoot and it's just the type of photos that I shoot don't do well on Alamy. I mean, the types of photos that do do well are more journalist or, you know, editorial type photos and people look for them more there. So just because I haven't done one Alamy you may want to try it out because it may work a lot better for your type of photography than it did for mine. So now let's talk about my plans for 2023. Now, if you go back and watch the same video that I did last year, my plans haven't really changed. I really want to focus selling photos and helping others monetize their photos too as NFTs and incorporating blockchain technology into my workflow to sell my photos with blockchain. Now I know over the past year crypto hasn't done great, but I've seen the headlines, NFTs have really plummeted as well too, but I haven't, you know, the technology hasn't changed. I am as optimistic about NFTs and crypto as I was this time last year before the crash. And the way that I see is what's happening right now in the crypto market and NFT market is very similar to what happened to the internet market back in 2001, 2002, okay? The internet was this great new technology and I was a web developer back then, right? I was in the software industry so I kind of like had a front row seat to watch all this happen. But what happened was the VCs got very enthusiastic about investing in the internet. Internet stocks went way up, right? And there's a bubble, bad things were invested in, money was put where money shouldn't have been put and eventually that bubble, bubble collapsed. However, if you look back at the majority of the gains of the big companies like Facebook, Amazon, Google, they all came after that internet crash, right? There wasn't a problem with internet technology. It still was a game-changing technology, right? The internet has incorporated itself into every aspect of our lives now, right? However, it didn't look that way back in 2001. There's people calling for the internet dead. It was a fad. It was something that was gonna go away. And it's the same things happening with the crypto and the NFT market right now. There was a huge bubble. Maybe NFTs and blockchain technology, the best use case, wasn't to have monkey profile techs. Maybe that's what everybody was fighting over, right? So there were some bad use cases, but the technology is sound and it is a transformative technology. It is a technology that I believe in. And I believe that this 20 years from now, just like we're kinda 20 years past the 2001 internet bubble crash, the blockchain and NFTs will be incorporated as much in our lives as the internet is today. And I don't think that's gonna change. I also still strongly believe that there is a place for NFTs and blockchain technology to really change selling your photos and licensing photos online and licensing all creatives online. And as I did with selling my photos online early on, when a lot of people said you'll never make any money doing it, and obviously I have and I'm glad that I got in early, I really do wanna get in early on the NFT technology. So although again, the market isn't as mature, the technology isn't mature. I just spent a lot of time doing research, trying to get things to work the way that I wanted to or the way that I thought they needed to for me to be able to make a profit as well is kinda share some of the learnings with all of you through this channel. And I have made some progress. I've got a prototype up now for an NFT marketplace that I plan on releasing my photos on within the next couple of months then hopefully opening up to other people later this year. But that's something, a little progress has been made, nothing's been released. Follow the channel though, there will be definitely more on that going forward. And as I go through and kinda get through the technical glitches of the technology, trying to figure out the best way to do things and the best way to license your photos online, I'm gonna be posting them all on this channel. Anyways, hopefully you found this useful. Leave me some comments below. I'll do my best to post more videos over this next year. And best of luck selling your photos online.