 Alright, in this video I'm going to be sharing my photo sales from May 2020. It's actually been a year now since I started doing these photo sales reports on YouTube. And boy, how things have changed in a year. This is what I looked like in that first photo sales report that I did last May. Now in this video I'm going to share how much money I made selling my photos on stock sites last month. Wow, I did not know how to shoot video or light video back then. I didn't realize so I went back and looked at some of my videos, but this whole global pandemic lockdown thing seems to have aged me more than a year since that last video was shot. Anyways, I'm going to get into it. I am going to make a bit of a change in the way that I do my revenue reporting that I'll talk about later just because of the way that the changes that have been happening over at Shutterstock, I think there's some other things that I want to report on as well. So if you don't know what I'm talking about, the changes that happened over for the contributors at Shutterstock, you can go and take a look at my last two videos that I posted last week. But if you're in a good mood, you may not want to go down to the comments section because the comments are overwhelmingly negative. But I think I've learned a lot from those comments about the other things that photographers are looking for, and I'm hoping to use that what I've learned from the comments and the discussions that I've had there to improve these monthly revenue reports. I'm going to talk a bit about that after I actually go through the numbers. All right, so my top site this month was Fine Art America. I made two sales on there, $30 each, which ended up being $60. Now $60 isn't a lot for a site. A lot of other months, $60 wouldn't be the top site. But because of the global pandemic, I'm really seeing my stock sales be much lower than they typically are. So $60 was enough for Fine Art America to be my top site for May. Now my number two site was Pexels. Again, not a huge amount of money, but still more than all the other stock sites. I got about $30 on there. And I didn't upload any photos to Pexels last month. So if you looked at my previous report from April, I had a much higher month through Pexels. That month, I actually had uploaded a bunch of photos. This month, I didn't upload any photos. I still got $30, which is nice to see because it looks like Pexels is starting to be a more consistent earner. Last year, it was like maybe you'd make $10 one month, and maybe you wouldn't the next month. But what I'm seeing now this year is it being more consistently between like the $20 and $60 mark every month, which is nice to see because I, again, I'm seeing my stock sales go down on all the other paid sites. So it's nice that the free sites are making me a bit more money. Next on the list is Shutterstock. Now one thing to notice, these are my May photo sales. So this is what my Shutterstock earnings were before the earnings tier. It was just slightly below Pexels. One of the things to note is that I have like twice as many photos up on Pexels as I do on Shutterstock. So it's, again, pretty crazy that Pexels is making me more money. I have 200 photos and Shutterstock is with 400. And, you know, Shutterstock may end up going down, may end up going up, talking about that a bit more later in the video. But, again, it's really interesting seeing what's going on in the stock industry right now that, you know, the free sites are making me more money than the stock sites. It's crazy. All right, next on the list is FreePick. Now, this is an interesting one because it's debuting at number four in the list and I've only got like 100 photos up there and they were only up for like half the month. Let me kind of talk you through what happened. So like back in February, someone from FreePick contacted me and they said, hey, you know, we see you're on Pexels. Can we download your photos from Pexels and put them on FreePick for sale? And it was going to be no extra work for me. So I'm like, all right, sure, try it out. Okay, so I heard nothing back, you know, didn't hear anything from them, totally forgot about it. But then back at like the middle of May, they contacted me and said, sort of the delay, your photos are now up on FreePick. So I was busy, didn't check the email. After like three or four days, I went under FreeBox to see these photos and see what this site was all about. So I hadn't really done a lot of research on it and saw my photos up there, but I also had like $7 in sales after only a couple of days, which again, is crazy good. Like typically when I upload sites, when I started with like Canva or something like that, it was like months before I made like a dollar. So the fact that, you know what I mean, I'm making $20, you know, with a very small number of photos is pretty good. The other thing is, is that when I first uploaded my photos to Pexels, I would do like a smaller resolution. So my thinking was at the time is like, what I'll do is I'll put a small resolution photo on Pexels and then some people will download that for free. And then if they want a larger resolution image, then they'll go to my website and purchase that. Well, that never panned out. Nobody ever came back to my website and purchased them. So I started uploading full-sized photos. It just wasn't worth the effort to make a smaller version for Pexels. But because of that, a lot of the photos I even have on Pexels didn't get accepted by FreePick because the resolution was too small. So again, a very small number of photos, $20, very promising. Now I'm not going to upload more photos there yet. Right now I'm still waiting to get approved. My paperwork approved. They're asking for like a residency certificate. They're an EU company. So I don't have a residency certificate. I don't even know what that is. So I've reached out to their support, asked them about that. Apparently it's something you need for taxes in the EU. So I don't know that I'm going to get paid yet. It just says I have $27. But if I can get through all the paperwork they have up on their site and I am going to get paid $27, I'll probably throw up another 100 photos, maybe at least the 100 low resolution photos that I have on Pexels. I'll throw them up on FreePick to see what happens because if I can get these types of numbers with a small number of photos, that would probably only go up. And it might be nice. This would replace some of the revenue that I'm losing from like Shutterstock and Adobe Stock and the other stock sites that typically, if you look at this time last year, we're earning way more than they are right now. Now next are deposit photos, one, two, three RF and Pixabay. Again, pretty standard for them. But number eight on the list is Adobe Stock. Now, this is really low for Adobe Stock for me. Again, I've been seeing it go down pretty consistently since COVID started. I did a bit of research, went on some of the other sites where people share their stock revenue. I think everybody's seeing the same thing. So again, this is not great. I was really seeing good things out of Adobe last year and I thought Adobe was gonna really be a big site for me this year, much better than it was in previous years. But unfortunately, it seems that because of COVID Adobe is being hit especially hard. Either that or maybe they just changed the way that all of them works and it doesn't favor me anymore. Again, there's a lot of different factors that could go into this. But the fact is is that May was just one of the lowest months I've had with Adobe in a very long time. So then there's the smaller sites and I ended up the month of tuner in $20. So that's like a huge drop if I compare that to my revenue last May. For me, typically May, June are typically pretty good months for my stock sales because I've got a lot of travel photos that were taken in the summer. And so at the start of the summer before the summer travel season, a lot of companies are out writing blog posts and updating their websites, a lot of marketing materials going out for the travel companies and the places that I visited. So this is typically a very good time of year for me for my stock sales. So it's pretty concerning that it's so low, but it's also pretty understandable that it's so low. Obviously, travel companies are not doing well right now because of the lockdowns and they're not gonna be spending on marketing. If people can't travel to your location, you're not gonna be going out and buying photos. So it's understandable, but again, not great for me, just this whole pandemic lockdown because of the types of photos that I have. Again, other people may be finding different things. If you had a different type of portfolio, you might not be seeing such a drop, but I'm definitely seeing a drop year over year because of the pandemic. Next, typically this is where I stopped the video. I just go through how much I made from each site for the year, but I'm gonna make a change. I'm gonna actually start doing a section on the end where I go through and I talk about what the average sale was on each site. Now, the reason I'm making this change is because of all the comments that I saw on the Shutterstock post that I did last week. I just really noticed that a lot of people were fixating on the 10 cents from Shutterstock and the low value. And I even had people telling me like, you don't respect yourself if you're putting your photos on Shutterstock. So I'm first gonna explain the way that I think about photos and why I didn't do an average sale report before, but then I'll talk about why I'm gonna change. So in my view, I just look at my overall average. I don't care whether I sold, if I make $10, I don't care whether that was 10 sales for $1 or 100 sales for 10 cents. To me, $10 is $10. And even above that, I don't even look at the sites, I just probably more look at my monthly sales, $220. That's like half a micro four thirds lens. That's how it kind of works in my mind. It's like, what can I get with this? So I'm not really concerned as much about the per sale, right? But I have noticed that other people are, right? And they've said that, you know, one of the reasons that they're gonna boycott Shutterstock is because they are doing 10 cent sales and their photos are worth more than that. And I should feel that my photos are worth more than that as well. Well, I do feel to myself, those photos are worth more than that, right? If Shutterstock came to me and said, I'll give you a million dollars to have exclusive rights to your photos and you have to delete them all off your hard drive, that's a hard no. Like there is no way I would ever do that because those photos are worth more to me than a million dollars. Like the experience that I have, the members I plan on, you know, I've got those photos up on my wall. I plan on viewing those photos for many years, right? And hoping that my kids will view those photos as well too, remembering places that we went together, all right? So the value to me of those photos is very, very high. But one of the things I think I understand that I kind of feel like some of the people may not understand is that the value to the market of those photos is very different. And the value to the market of those photos depends also on use, right? So for Shutterstock, for the companies that they're selling to, the ones that are buying the $750 image subscription, so photos that are companies that need 750 stock images a month, the market value to those companies is 10 cents a photo, okay? Because they're not looking for quality, they're going through, and they need like 750 photos a month, they need a wide variety. Now, there is no way that me as an individual stock photographer can market to those companies. I've only got like 750 stock photos, right? So I can never sell a subscription to those companies for 750 photos a month, right? And the value there is 10 cents, I'm just happy to get the 10 cents from Shutterstock and I will keep selling there. However, you know, if you look at Fine Art America, Fine Art America this month, I got two sales and that was $60. Now that's a totally different market value because Fine Art America is selling my photos as art. And those photos are going on people's walls and they're willing to pay more for a photo and then I make more for that photo. Now, there's a lot less people putting my photos on the walls than there is these companies that are going through 750 photos. So they have a different market value based on the use, okay? So when I look at my photos again, there's the value to me, but then there's also the market value. And I think about it more that way. Now that being said, I just now realize that a number of people don't think about it that way. They just think about the value of the photo and the value of the photo is 10 cents. And so for those people, if they are going through and deciding which sites to go on, it'll be important for them to know but what's the average sale on those sites? So although I don't kind of agree with it, the reason that I created this channel was to help photographers make money. And if me reporting on the average sale from these sites is gonna help other photographers, then I wanna do it. So after that long explanation, I'm not gonna go through and show you what the average sale was on all the sites that I just went through. All right, so here's the list. Now, all I've done is I've gone through and I've looked at my total revenue and I've divided it by the total downloads or sales. Now, for Pixels and Pexa Bay, I couldn't go through and do it based on download because all they tell you on the site is how many downloads you have total. So, you know, what I could have done is gone through on May 1st and looked at the total downloads, then looked at the end of May and looked at the total downloads and figured out how many downloads for that month but I didn't do that. However, I did do that going forward. So next month, I'll be able to show you the average for download and it's gonna be like a minuscule number probably because there's a lot of downloads to get one donation but what I've done for this month is I've just shown the average donation. So I go through, looked at all the donations I received, kind of average it out and that's what you're seeing up here. So I think this is also gonna be interesting for as we see Shutterstock, right? One of the things that, you know, one of my past videos said, it says not totally clear to me whether my average sale on Shutterstock because the tier change is gonna go up or down but I'm gonna report on this and discuss it. So next month, you know, we'll see at the end of June, you know, how is my average? And I'll try to compare it events other months as well too. So we can try to figure out, you know, Shutterstock, how much of a drop is it on average per photo? I think that's a better way that we're gonna need to look at it because sales are so kind of sketchy right now as far as like COVID. So, you know what I mean? If you see a downward trend in your Shutterstock, it could be because of the pandemic or it could be because of the tier changes. But if we look at the average revenue per download, I think that's a fair way to look at it to see how these tier changes that Shutterstock did are actually gonna affect you as a photographer in your earnings. So hopefully you found that useful. Let me know in the comments below what you think about me sharing the average photo sale on the site, whether that's useful or not. Also, if you're not subscribed to the channel, make sure you subscribe because then when we go into July, you'll be able to go through and see how the tier change has affected my Shutterstock sales and whether the average revenue went up or down. And best of luck selling your photos online.