 So out of the blue, I received this email from a stock photography company. And it wasn't a scam, they actually sent me the money. Now this income was so passive that I didn't even know that I was earning it. Hi, I'm James Wheeler, and welcome to the channel and thanks for watching. So how did this happen? Well, about five years ago, I was getting into stock photography and I uploaded a couple hundred photos to about a dozen sites. After that, I figured out which sites I was making the most money on and I kept uploading photos to the best sites. Now, one of those sites was called Photodune. At the time, Photodune was making me about $50 a year. So it wasn't really worth the effort to keep uploading there regularly. Also, I didn't bother reading the emails they sent me because the stock photography companies, they send you a lot of marketing emails. So without my knowledge, Photodune made some pretty big changes on their platform and my earnings went from $50 over a year to over $250 a month. As part of this change, I needed to re-enter my payment information and I didn't know that I need to do this. So the revenue just kept stacking up until I had over $2,000 in my account ready to be withdrawn. So now I'm gonna get into what kinds of changes they made and how it really benefits their contributors to the platform. So what Photodune found was that their photo collection was increasing but their sales weren't and there was a lot of photos that they had on their platform that weren't making any sales at all. They decided to revamp their entire service to be about quality over quantity. Before they started this process, they had over nine million photos and when they were done, they only had 200,000 and 11 of those 200,000 photos were mine and I was one of the 4% of contributors that they kept on the platform. Now that change alone wasn't what made my earnings skyrocket. They also launched a new service and a new website for unlimited uploads called Evanto Elements and that's why I didn't recognize the name when I first received that email. This new site had unlimited uploads so my 11 photos were part of a collection where buyers could go and purchase the subscription and download it unlimited photos every month. Now this may make a lot of photographers cringe but it's actually what resulted in my increase in my earnings. Now with this service, Evanto decided to use a different way to calculate the earnings for the photographers. This new way of calculating the earnings is called Subscriptions Share and this new way of calculating earnings for contributors is the reason that my revenues jumped from $50 a year to $250 plus a month. Okay so before I explain how Evanto calculates the earnings for the photographer, you first kinda need to understand how the traditional stock agencies like Shutterstock calculate the earnings so I'll explain that first and I'll explain why the way that Evanto does it is much better for contributors. Shutterstock also has subscriptions and here's a list of their current monthly rates. For subscriptions, Shutterstock pays contributors 33 cents, 36 cents, or 39 cents depending on their level. I'm at the 36 cents level so in theory if someone purchases 750 images a month subscription and then only downloaded images for me, Shutterstock would actually lose money on that month but that rarely happens. So on the other hand, if a subscriber downloads one photo in a month, then Shutterstock pays out the 36 cents for that one photo and then they keep the rest of the subscription earnings. If a subscriber doesn't download anything over the month, then Shutterstock will keep the subscription rate and the contributors don't actually make anything from that subscriber that month. So now let's compare to how Evanto Elements pays their contributors. So an unlimited subscription on Evanto Elements is $33 a month right now. Now Evanto takes 50% of that and distributes the rest to contributors no matter how many downloads the subscriber makes. That's $16.50 for contributors no matter what. So if a subscriber downloads one photo, then one photographer gets $16.50. If a subscriber downloads two photos, then two photographers get $8.25 and so on. Here's the crazy thing. If a subscriber doesn't download anything, then what Evanto does, they take that $16.50 and they distribute it evenly amongst all of the contributors on the platform. And this isn't a small amount. Since Evanto Elements started, every month the contributor bonus has grown. And so far I've received over $4,500 from the contributor bonus alone. Now think about what you would do with an extra $4,500. Here's what I'm seriously considering doing with it. Now, if you think this is a good deal, give this video a thumbs up and let me know in the comments what you think. Now, Evanto has paid contributors over $750 million and they have a goal to pay contributors $1 billion. This isn't just for photos. Evanto Elements also includes videos, WordPress themes and all kinds of other creative materials. So now that I've actually been doing a bit of research, Evanto seems like a pretty cool company, especially compared to some of the other big stock companies that seem pretty heartless. Not to name any names, good images. Other sites like Shutterstock boast a massive amount of photos but how many of those photos are really useful to their buyers? If you search for anything on Shutterstock, the first page of results are gonna be really good for pretty much anything you search because it's sorting on relevance and the search algorithm is just so good it will show good photos. But if you go and change it to do most recent, the photos that come up are pretty average at best a lot of the time. In comparison, if you go to Evanto Elements and you do a search, again, based on relevance you're gonna see a lot of great photos. But if you go and you look at most recent, I think that these photos are a lot more marketable and a lot more usable by buyers than the ones that I just saw over on Shutterstock. So I want you to think that I mean that you get on Shutterstock, I have way more photos up on Shutterstock than I do on Evanto Elements and I'm more than happy to receive checks from both of them. But I think it's gonna be interesting to see what buyers prefer, whether they stick with the old way of doing things which is Shutterstock or whether this new model that Evanto is using is gonna get traction in the marketplace and right now it seems like it is. Now if you wanna see how Evanto compares to my sales on other stock sites, I've got a video on that and I'll put a link up here. Also make sure to subscribe to the channel with this link down here. Best of luck selling your photos online.