 All right, in this video I'm gonna go through and talk about my stock photography sales in July. So I'll go through all the sites that I sell my photos on and I'll talk through the sales. Again, nothing really that exciting happened in July. It was a pretty regular month for me. So I'm actually gonna go into this video and talk a bit more about what I've been doing with NFTs. I got some comments on my other NFT video that turned out to be very powerful that are on YouTube about don't give up on NFTs. And I definitely have not given up on NFTs. I really think that NFTs are gonna be the future of photography licensing. And I wanna talk a bit about what I'm doing with those as well as there's a new NFT marketplace out there that I wanna go through and review, talk about what they've done, the good things and the bad things about it. So I'll start off with my regular report like I do and then I'll go in and talk a lot about NFTs throughout the rest of the video. Okay, so let's just get into it. So my top site was Shutterstock for July, $43. Not an amazing month for Shutterstock but again, it's pretty good for them. It's kind of the third time this year where it's been one of the top sites. So that's good. I didn't have a lot of other big sales in the last couple of months. If you've been watching my video, you'll notice that I've made a fair amount of Fine Art America sales. So I've been getting Fine Art America sales the last couple of months, but this past month I didn't get any Fine Art America sales. And that's so because of that, Shutterstock was able to stay at the top of the list. Next is Adobe Stock. Now that's a pretty good month for Adobe Stock. For me, and the reason for that is is that that includes $10 of adding my photos to the free portion of Adobe Stock. So if you watched my video a couple months ago, one of the things Adobe did is they've opened up a new free version of Adobe Stock and they'll give you $5 to add your photos to that free portion of the Adobe Stock site for one year. So I chose a number of my photos that weren't getting any sales on Adobe anyways and I put them in for review. And two of them got accepted in July, so that's $10, $5 each. Four more have since been accepted in August. So in August I'll get $20 for those. So they're obviously going through and slowly reviewing them. I've still got a lot of other photos that are in review status, the vast majority are. So it seems like they're just kind of taking their time going through them, probably a manual process. So I would expect them maybe every month for the next little while, they're gonna be adding a couple more to that list. Next on the list is Smugmug. I made one sale on Smugmug this past month and that was $24. So Smugmug is where I have my own personal websites and this person probably found me through the search engine, Google, or maybe my social media and they purchased one license there. So when you have your own website, you get to keep all the vast majority of the sale. So that's why one sale is so much higher on Smugmug but I have to do all the marketing for it, right? It's not like Shutterstock where they're bringing all the buyers in and they basically, you get a small portion of what the sale is. Smugmug, I bring the buyers in but I got a large portion of what the sale is. Next deposit photos, pretty standard months for there. Pixels was a bit low in July. I typically make more from donations on pixels than $9 or I have been recently at least. So that's a bit lower a month but still $9 from pixels or sorry, pixels, not pixels. And one, two, three RF again, regular month, streams time small and I ended up with $137 in July. So not as good as the months previous but still not one of my worst months for the year. I think that's like my third lowest month of the year. So pretty much about average considering we're seven months into the year, okay? So that's really what I did from my photo sales on the traditional sites. Now what I wanna do is just take a look at some of the things I've been doing with NFTs. So if you watch one of my videos of all back, back in March and April, I created a number of NFTs, put them on the NFT marketplaces and none of them sold, okay? So I wasn't able to sell any of my photos as NFTs. NFTs really kind of went up and there was like a huge interest in NFTs in March and April and it's kind of gone down a little bit but not as much as I would have expected to be honest. NFTs are still very popular and they're still moving forward and I do really see NFTs as being the future. However, NFTs the way they're set up right now don't really work for me, okay? The reason is is that right now NFTs are really set up to be collectibles, right? Like a lot of these NFT marketplaces are for digital collectibles. So if you wanna go through and collect, you know, cypherpunks or collect gifts are those other things. So that's really good if the type of photographer you do is collectible, I guess, right? So people who sell fine art prints, right? If you were a photographer that made the vast majority of your revenue off fine art prints, NFTs would be great the way they are right now. But that's not me, right? The vast majority of my photography revenue comes from, you know, selling licenses on the stock sites. And because of that, the current NFTs setups aren't really working that well for me. The reason is is that because right now what you do is when you put an NFT, you're purchasing an NFT but you're not purchasing a license to the NFT, okay? Now that could be done, right? It's definitely possible to have an NFT, you know, be used to purchase stock photography licenses, but that's not the way they're currently being implemented. Okay, so one of these needs to understand is that NFTs are really in their infancy, they're gonna, you know, be built out over a number of years, okay? And that's one of the things that I'm looking at doing because there is no good way to license a photo through an NFT right now. And so that's something that we're looking at building and we're not looking at, we're actively building for photo loo. So one of the features of photo loo is going to be, you know, the ability to license photos for NFTs. And it's gonna be more of an open source project. There'll be more of that to come on this channel later on, right? If you're interested in getting notified when we release those types of features, we will be looking for beta testers. We will also be, you know, looking for, you know, first people to come in and start using these NFT photo licensing platforms. You can go to uniquestock.io and just sign up for our mailing list there. That's where we're basically collecting all the people that are interested in this. And then we'll basically once, you know, we're ready to release or we're ready to go out, we'll let you know via that mailing list, all right? So that's what, you know, I see right now they're really set up for collectibles. They could be used for licenses, but they're not yet, but we're working on building that. Now, there is one site though that's come out. It came out a couple months ago, but I thought I would spend a bit of time seeing how it worked out before I went and reviewed it. But it's an NFT marketplace for photographers, okay? So this has been set up, it's, you know, it's been live for a couple months now, I think about three months, it's been live for. And it's actually set up specifically for photographers. So I want to go through and take a look at it and, you know, give it a bit of a review. Let me know, let you know my thoughts on it, okay? So what it's called is it's called uniqueone.photo. Okay, now what this is, uniqueone, they've got a number of different NFT marketplaces. Unfortunately, they don't have the most popular NFT marketplaces. So this isn't a very popular marketplace, but they do definitely have other marketplaces that people are using. Unfortunately, nobody's really using the uniqueone.photo marketplace. Yeah, maybe they will in the future, but I do see some challenges they're gonna have because they're using the standard implementation of an NFT that's meant for a collectible and they're trying to solve photos with it, right? So if you want to take a look here, the first thing you're gonna note if you go to the uniqueone photo, they've got two different marketplaces, okay? One is the Binance Smart Chain and one is the Ethereum. Now, if you're not familiar with blockchain, you know, just one thing to note is that there's not one blockchain. Often you hear like the blockchain, there's not one blockchain. There are many blockchains, okay? And two of the most popular blockchains are the Ethereum blockchain and the Binance Smart Chain, all right? They are very similar. If you were to write code that, you know, an NFT that works on Ethereum, you can just pick that up and put it onto the Binance Smart Chain without any changes because they're totally compatible with each other. So that's why a lot of companies like this just do that because it's very simple to put it onto different marketplaces. The reason that they do this is the ETH marketplace, the gas fees, which is the fee that it costs to do a transaction to create an NFT or sell an NFT, can be high, okay? You know, in the 10s, 20s, you know, back when it was really popular to create NFTs back in March, you could be hundreds of dollars to create an NFT, which was, you know, significantly high, especially if you're not gonna be, you know, just if you're just testing things out. So the Binance Smart Chain is a cheaper Smart Chain to use. It's kind of less secure, less decentralized because of that, but for NFTs, it's probably good enough. And the Binance Smart Chain is cheaper. Now it's not ridiculously cheap. We're not talking about cents to mint NFTs. We're talking about dollars, maybe five or $6 to mint an NFT, depending on what the prices are in that particular time. So significantly lower than the youth marketplace. Now, one of the things to note is that these are not the only two blockchains. There are other blockchains out there that are significantly cheaper, okay? There are blockchains where you can mint NFTs for cents, all right, or even fractions of cents. Now, these blockchains aren't as popular as these ones, but they are coming up. So in the future, one of the things to note is that one of the reasons people say NFTs won't take off for photographer-photographer licensing is because of the fees and the gas costs to do that, that's not gonna be the case forever. This is obviously a problem that people realize they're working on, there's lots of solutions out there and there's working other blockchains that have cheaper solutions to this. So that is a technical limitation right now that is gonna go away over time, all right? So what I'll do is I'm just gonna go and take a look at the youth marketplace. So if you go through and take a look at this, what this allows you to do is create an NFT for your photo and sell your photo. Now, why this is different is because it's specifically related to photography and one of the things they let you do is choose a license. So when you're creating an NFT on OpenSea, there's no real licensing concept of it. But this one, what you can do is you can choose from different licenses for your photos. So this is definitely a step forward from the rareable marketplace or the OpenSea marketplace to the other ones that I meant to my NFTs on back in March because it allows you to choose a license. So you're actually licensing out your photo within that. Now, if I scroll down here, one of the things they do though is they basically put their stats on here. And these stats are publicly available on a blockchain. So we could actually go and check these. One of the cool things about blockchain technologies. But as you can see, it's been up here for a couple of months and really the photographer sold our $64. And there's only been 100 photographer photographs minted. So they haven't really got much adoption on this yet. I hope they do. But right now, really nobody has gone through and used this, the ETH marketplace. Now, if we go and look at the Binance Spark Chain marketplace, the one that's cheaper to create NFTs, they are doing a bit better on this. So I'll go through and I'm gonna go through and review that one in a bit more detail. So you can go through here and they've got a thousand photographs and then almost $2,000 in photo sales. So that's 300 photographers. Again, it's not a ton, but it's definitely larger than what they have on the ETH. And you can basically go through and see that. Now, the issue I see with this is that the way they've set up the NFT is they basically just took a standard NFT. They actually took the exact same NFT that Rarible uses and they put it on here. Now, the thing with that image NFT implementation is is that when you go through and purchase an NFT, you're purchasing the NFT and you do it more as like a one-off. So you have to mint the NFT and do it. You're not actually purchasing a license. You can't have like an infinite number of licenses. So it's okay, again, it's using a collectible setup, but you know what I mean? Only one person can go through and purchase the license. The other thing to notice is there's no stopping from somebody else from getting these licenses elsewhere. So there's no, I don't see like a huge advantage here for a buyer of stock photography to go in and buy an NFT from this marketplace as opposed to going to one of the other marketplaces like Shutterstock, right? So let's go take a look. If I go and look at some of these photos, there are some definitely some good photos here, but let's take a look at this one, Dome on the Rock, okay? So this is a photograph that somebody's uploaded and they've set it at five BNB, okay? Now, five BNB it's like that equals out to about $2,000. So they're selling a license to this photo for $2,000. But if we were to go to Shutterstock and let's say this is apparently called Dome on the Rock and I go to my search for that, I can see there's a lot of other photos here of the Dome on the Rock, okay? There's illustrations. Again, that's a wall process photo, that other one, but these photos can be purchased for like $10 off Shutterstock, right? So thinking about it from a buyer's perspective, you know, does it really make sense for me to go in and pay $2,000 for this photo of Dome on the Rock as opposed to going to Shutterstock and paying $10 for one of those many, many other photos of Dome on the Rock, right? There's some, these are pretty good photos. That's a nice photo there, nice sunset photo, nicely processed. Is that other photo worth 200 times this one? Probably not, okay? Now obviously the people can list them for cheaper, but even the gas fees to create them and transaction are gonna be a couple of dollars and these are selling for $10 and there's just way more options here than there is ever gonna be on those. I don't see this particular implementation of ever taking off, right? I think again, it will work well for people who wanna collect photos, okay? So if somebody wants to go and collect a photo from an artist, this site could do very well and I hope it does, right? I hope photographers can use this site to make a lot of money, but I don't think the vast majority of people are gonna go to this site and start purchasing photo licenses from it, right? And because lots of people won't start purchasing photo licenses, probably a lot of photographers won't go there. Unfortunately, the way that selling stock photography works is the company sets up a stock site and if they can get buyers to come to that stock site and buy things and the photographers will then go to it, right? You know, if they can't, they won't, right? The photographers will typically upload their photos or put time and upload in the photos where they can make the money from, okay? So that's just one thing to note about this site. I do hope it takes off. It hasn't really yet, but I don't think it will because it's using the collectible version of an NFT and the collectible version of the NFTs on these marketplaces. It's just too expensive and they can't really compete with the shutter stops of the world, okay? Now, the one that we're working on, so we're working on a solution for this, ad photo loo. And what we're planning on doing or not planning on doing, we're working on, is creating a licensable NFT, okay? So this will work a little bit differently than the NFTs that are out there right now, but what people will be able to do is they'll be able to mint an NFT and then somebody will be able to purchase a license of that, off that NFT, okay? And the license can be, they can purchase a license and the license will be provided to them. And by doing it this way, what we're gonna be doing is we're gonna really be able to set it up so that NFTs are really kind of just being used to be the backend payment system and what they're really gonna be doing is just doing all the things that Shutterstock does, but doing it on a blockchain and because it's doing it programmatically on a blockchain, we can do it significantly cheaper than Shutterstock. So although you may still, you're still gonna be licensing your photos out with the photo loo version of this, for probably $10, it'll have to be comparable to the Shutterstock price, otherwise buyers aren't gonna be able to come in. That's reality of the situation, right? So the plan would be is that the licenses would be comparable, probably slightly lower than what Shutterstock is charging. However, because of the technology being used, the vast majority of that license cost can go to the photographer, okay? So although basically the way that we wanna set it up is so that the purchaser of the photo license is getting a better deal, they're getting more transparency, they're getting a better product, it's gonna be much easier to use to download photos for more cheaply. And the photographer will get more money, a higher percentage cut of that because of the technology being used. There's a lot of stuff that Shutterstock has to do that can be automated with blockchain technology. The other thing that we're doing with the photo loo version of the NFT is we are going to be putting it probably on one of the cheaper smart chains, we won't be using Binance Smart Chain. There's two or three in the running right now, but the plan is, is that you would be able to mint NFT for cents. And people will be able to buy NFTs for fractions of cents, okay? So getting rid of the issue with these gas fees, right? Because that is really killing these things here. That's why they have to kind of make it so large or some of these prices so large, right? If you're paying $5 to create an NFT, then you need to have a higher price to make sure that for the ones that don't sell, the ones that do sell, you need to have a higher price to make up the profit, right? But if you're only spending a cent or so to mint an NFT and then a couple more cents, maybe to store the photo, then you can basically make the prices lower and still make a profit as a photographer, right? So that's what we're looking at again. If you're interested in learning more about that, it is still in development right now, but we do plan on releasing it in the near future. And if that interests you, just go to UniqueStock.io, sign up for the mailing list. Then when we're ready, you'll get notified and you can kind of get more information on this. Also, I'll be putting things on this channel about the NFTE as well, about the NFT project. So you can go ahead, subscribe to the channel, turn the notifications on, and that's another great way to kind of keep up to date about what we're doing and how we're trying to make more money for photographers using NFTEs and blockchain technologies. Anyways, hopefully you found this a bit useful. Got some information out of the update. I mean, best of luck selling your photos online.