 Alright, so today I'm going to walk you through my photo sales from February. I'm going to talk about some changes to the channel, and I'm also going to talk about my new NFT project. Now, if you're new to the channel, I'm James, and I do these revenue reports every single month, so I go through and take a look at how much money I made selling my photos and videos online. If that's something that interests you, go ahead and click the subscribe button and make sure you click the light button for the YouTube algorithm. So my top site for February was Deposit Photos. Only $28, so not a great top site. Deposit Photos has been doing much better recently, so it's not surprising. It is surprising, though, that I didn't get a lot of sales on the free sites last month, so they typically are in the top set, but they weren't this past month. Next is Fine Art America. I did make two sales on Fine Art America that I averaged out to $20, so that was my second best site. Now, the third site was Pexels. So this is a bit lower than it has been in previous months. Now, I didn't upload any photos to Pexels last month, so that could be why. Although, I still, you know, typically do make higher donations on Pexels or from Pexels, even when I don't upload photos. So that was a bit lower, but again, if being a donation site, it kind of goes up and down, so not totally surprising. Now, next is Shutterstock. Bad month for Shutterstock, again. I did move up a level in their, you know, their tiered system. So for those of you that don't know selling on Shutterstock, your tier gets reset in every January. So I went back to the initial tier. I've now moved up to tier two and, you know, probably by, you know, depending on how sales go, by June, I might be up to tier three or tier four, which will start making a bit more money that I was making last year. So a really low month in February, typically February is a bit lower month from my stock sales. So not totally surprising, but this is pretty low for Shutterstock. It's been going down quite a bit recently. Next is Adobe Stock, again, a bit disappointing there, too, but still $12. This time last year, Adobe Stock was doing much better. It just seems to have been going down for me recently. Maybe I need to upload more photos there, but that is another one that hasn't been doing well for me recently. Next is Pickfair. This is pretty rare. I don't get a lot of sales on Pickfair, maybe a couple of year, but one of them did come in February and Pickfair, they give you a much higher percentage of your photo sales. So I get $8 for just one photo sale as opposed to, if you look at Shutterstock, I, you know, get $12 for 48 photo sales. So that is one of the good things about Pickfair. Though they're less frequent, you can get a higher revenue from them. Next is Smokemunk. I made one download off my Smokemunk site. Again, being my own site, I get a higher revenue, so I got that for $7. And then, you know, you can go through the lower ones as well, too. You know, pretty average here. Dreamstime had a lower month. And if you get down to the bottom, I made a revenue of about $120, which again is on the low side for me, and this is the time of year when it is typically lower February. Typically for me, things start to pick up a little bit around April, May, June timeframe because a lot of my photos are landscape photos from the summer, and they're used by companies that want to, you know, sell travel services. So with things opening up for travel, with the vaccines rolling out, I do expect that my sales will hopefully pick up a bit more in the spring because I expect that this is going to be a big season for travel companies and, you know, travel magazines, travel blogs. Everybody wants to get out and travel after being inside for so long. So as people get vaccinated and are able to travel more, I think there will be more advertising going on, which I think will be good for me from a revenue point of view. Now, for those of you that watch the channel regularly, one of the things I'll notice is the format of these has changed, right? Right now, what I'm doing is I'm, you know, doing this kind of PowerPoint presentation thing with myself in it, and typically what I would do is I have the camera in a different position and, you know, I have the revenue go down the side. I've decided to go ahead and change things. And the reason is, is because I have to spend a lot of time on editing when I do it in that format. And what I want to start doing on this channel is being able to post more videos. You know, if I look at last year, I post revenue report every year and I post another four or five videos. I really wasn't posting very often. And the main reason for that is because of time. It's not because I don't have ideas or nothing because I don't have things that I want to share. It's just because I don't have time to, you know, shoot and edit and upload the videos. And, you know, I don't really like that. And what I want to be able to do is to be able to post more regularly, maybe a couple of videos a month or even maybe one a week that might be a bit ambitious for me, given all the other responsibilities I have, but just be able to post more in general. So what I've decided to do is kind of come up with a new YouTube setup that will allow me to be able to post videos more frequently, because I'll allow me to be able to edit them much more quickly and to spend less time on them. So what you're going to notice going forward on this channel is that they will be a bit more raw, a bit less scripted, and hopefully there'll be more of them, right? So I really do want to start being able to share more of my ideas, and this is the way that I plan on doing it. Now, one of the reasons that I do want to start posting more videos is that I want to start posting more about NFTs. Now, let me just kind of talk about how I got to this place for a minute. Last year, if you watched my year in review video, you'll notice that, you know, my stock sales have been just going down year over year for a number of years now. And last year, my highest site was Fine Art America. So, you know, one of the things I looked at this year is, I'm like, you know, maybe I should be selling my photos more on the art on demand sites as opposed to on the stock sites and spend a bit less time focusing on stock, a bit more time focusing on art on demand sites. So I did a lot of investigation into that. You know, I started going down that route a bit, but that kind of, you know, veered off to there's a lot of the art and demand sites started, you know, selling merch or selling photos and shirts and things like that. So I started going that round and thinking, well, maybe this should be a good idea for me to sell my photos as, you know, t-shirts and merch. So I started looking into that. I signed up for an Amazon merch account and set up for the accounts. I was doing research and investigating there. I've also looked into videos and I was really looking for ways to supplement the fact that my stock sales have been going down and just look at other avenues or other sites that I could sell my photos on and also, you know, post on these on this channel, right? So the idea was as I would go and try a bunch of these sites, see which ones were successful and I'd be able to share that with you. Now, as I was doing that, one of the things, you know, that got very popular recently was NFTs and, you know, so I started looking into those as well and looking into the NFTs, they really just excite me so much more than, you know, selling my photos as art as well as selling my photos as merch. I just think there's like a huge potential upside for NFTs. I think they are the future and so I'm going to talk about that a bit more, but one of the things that I've really noticed is that it's not easy to learn about NFTs, you know, it's such a new technology. It's such, you know, a lot of the websites are new. It's been really difficult for me to learn. I'm a pretty technical person, right? Like, you know, I'm a software developer. I can go and write code, read code. I'm pretty technical, but understanding exactly how these NFTs works was very difficult and I have figured out a lot of things over the past couple of weeks and what I'd like to be able to do is share them. So as I kind of figure out some of these things with NFTs, I'd like to be able to set it up and quickly share those items. So, you know, just to know what to expect is that on this channel, I do plan on posting more videos about NFTs as I learn more as I try to make my own NFTs sales. I'm going to be posting videos about those here on the for the channel. So on that note, in this particular video, I want to talk about why NFTs are valuable. Now, there's a lot of things you can talk about. NFTs have been really, you know, I've been in comments. I've been on Reddit talking to people about this and I haven't seen the same things come up over and over again. So I'm going to try to address them on this channel. There are things like, you know, are NFTs bad for the environment? You know, should we be supporting them because they are potentially bad for the environment? Things like the high gas fees and I'm going to do videos about those in the future for sure. But in this video, I want to talk about is do NFTs have value or is there any value in NFTs? Right now, this may seem like a silly thing to talk about considering one of them just sold for $69 million. But what a lot of people are saying is that this is a bubble and this is a fad and these NFTs are going to go away and I don't think that's true and I want to explain why. Now, I do think there is a bit of a bubble in NFTs right now, but I don't think they're a fad. I can definitely see like I've been really looking into the technology, how these work and I do think that there is going to be a huge future for NFTs in the art world as well as in the photography world. There's one of the things to note is that I was aware of NFTs and I was aware of all these sites a couple of years ago. I went back and looked at my notes. I went and looked at wearable and looked a lot of these sites and I saw all these pixelated images there and I thought, you know, this is never going to be, you know, mainstream for photographers. This isn't something I want to focus on right now. But I have changed my mind about that and I do think that photographers, videographers in general are going to be using NFTs in five years in some way or another. Now, one of the reasons around that is just because all the popularity of the NFTs in the art world and because of that, these NFTs are going to become valuable for the general public eventually and I think they probably are valuable for myself and even maybe you and let me just kind of explain that one of the arguments you'll see is that NFTs have no value because you can just download the JPEG. Okay. So, you know, why would anybody buy an NFT? If you could just get the JPEG. Now, one of the things that you need to understand though, is that value is all in the eyes of the beholder. Okay. Even money is based on the fact that it has value, even though money really doesn't have any value. You know, if you think about the currency in whatever country you're in, you can get a million dollars or a million pounds or whatever of that currency, a million euros of that currency. If you go to some spot in Asia in the Himalayans where they don't know what that currency is, it has no value. The only reason that money has value is because everybody agrees that it has value and that you can take that money and you know, you can get by food with it or you can buy, you know, a hotel room to stay. If you have a million American dollars up in the Himalayans and nobody knows what that million American dollars is, all of that million dollars is worth for is, you know, starting a fire to cook food and to heat yourself. You can't do anything with that because people aren't going to accept it as tender. Okay. So that's one of the things you really need to kind of think about is that, you know, money is only valuable because people make it valuable. Right. And NFTs are exactly the same way. They're only valuable because people make them valuable and they obviously are valuable. Now, you know, people sold at NFT for 69 million dollars. Okay. Now that was probably way too much. It was a bit of a marketing stunt. You know, there's a number of different ways you can kind of look at that, but the reality of it is, is that that NFT is now worth something. Okay. It's worth something to general society. It's probably worth something to me and it would probably worth something to you. Right. Just the fact that it sold for 69 million dollars. If someone had come up to you or people had come up to you six months ago, if you didn't weren't familiar with NFTs at that time and said, you know, I'll sell you this digital token that represents, you know, my artwork that I post regularly on Instagram and I'll sell it to you for $100. Nobody would have done that or the vast majority of people wouldn't do that. You might like his art and maybe do it at a charity, but there wasn't you. Most people didn't see value in that NFT six months ago. Okay. Now let's go to today. Let's say the say you found a way or somebody can say, you know what? I get that NFT that somebody purchased for 69 million dollars. I can tell you that one and only unique NFT. This is not a scam for $1000. I'd buy it. You'd probably buy it too. The reason is because you know that it had 69 million dollars for the value to someone else and for $1000. You can probably put it on auction and solve for $10,000. Maybe a million dollars. Okay. So something that had no value to me six months ago now has a value to me. I would value that NFT at six at $1000. Even if the only reason that I would value it is that I could, you know, sell it again later. It does have value for me. So you can already start, start to see the shift that people's perceptions and these things do have value and you can't go back now, right? Once people see something as having value, it will just have more and more value, especially when it's something that is in limited quantity. All right. This is the exact same thing with Bitcoin. Bitcoin doesn't really have any value, but millions of people have agreed that it has value. So it will continue to have value. It will not go away, right? Same thing, you know, and this is not new. This new that is happening in the digital world. It's not new that it's happening. The same thing goes with, you know, gold, right? The gold standard. If you have a block of gold, what am I going to do with a block of gold? A block of gold. I can't pay my mortgage with a block of gold. I can't, you know, go out and buy food with a block of gold, but a block of gold still has value because everybody agrees that it has value and I know that I can always sell gold for something. And that's where NFTs are going to be. That's where Bitcoin is pretty much already going. You always already know that people are going to be able to sell Bitcoin for something. So that's why I think NFTs do have value. Why I think they will continue to have value and I don't think that it is going to fall away. So although there may be a bubble right now and we're probably not going to see, you know, multi-million dollar NFT sales, you know, every month in the future, I do think you're going to see NFT sales in the future. I do think they're going to become more mainstream as the technology matures and I'll talk about that in future videos. Anyways, you found this useful. Make sure you hit the like button and if you're new to the channel, make sure you subscribe and best luck selling your photos online.