 Now, I'm not a professional photographer, but I've made $35,000 selling my photos online. In this video, I'm going to go through exactly how I did it. Which sites I've tried, which ones worked, which ones didn't, as well as which ones I think are the best sites in the coming year. Let's get started. Hi, I'm James. I make a living as a software developer, but I love travel and landscape photography. For the past seven years, I've been selling my photos online. Now, I'm going to be going through the results that I've got selling my photos online, but your results may differ depending on the type of photographer you do. I'd love to hear in the comments section about whether you've tried selling your photos online before and what type of success you've had. Also, stick around at the end of this video because I'm going to go through which sites I think are going to be the best in the coming year. Now, I'm going to jump on the computer and show you some charts of the sales I've had over the past seven years. So, I keep track of the revenue from each website in Excel. So, what I'm going to do is I've just created five charts in Excel where I can kind of walk you through how I make money selling my photos online. I'm going to start at a pretty high level and I'll get into more detail. At the end, I'll kind of go through how much money I've made from each individual site. So, this is how the $35,000 breaks out year over year. You can see that when I started here, my first year I only made about $1,000. And then it continued to increase over the next for the first four years until 2015 when I reached the high of $7,000 a year and there's a bit of decline starting to rebound now. In this chart, you can kind of see why it went up and then went down. The green shows my revenue and the red shows how many photos I posted each year. So, you can see my first year I posted about 100 photos, uploaded them to different sites online. And then my second year I was very motivated. I did over 240 photos and these are 240 fully processed photos that I uploaded to multiple sites. Now, in November of 2013, my wife and I had our second child and the time that I had to go traveling and take photos as well as process those photos went down. So, you can see in 2014, I only uploaded about 100 photos. Now, despite uploading less photos, my revenue kept going up in 2014 and even in 2015. Even though the amount of photos that I posted went down. Now, in 2016, we had our third child and I just really didn't have much time to travel and do photography. So, 2016 and 2017, I really didn't post many photos and that's why you can see here that my revenue went down for those years and over the past year, year and a half in 2018, I started to post a bit more and it started to go back up. So, you can see that once you upload your photos, you can keep getting revenue from them, even if you're not posting regularly, but it will go down slightly year over year. Looking at it a different way, this way I've shown the red line is the cumulative photos. So, you can see how my photos grew over time and right now I've got about 600 good photos posted across many sites across the web. Now, if you look at the types of sites that I upload to, you can really break them into three main sites. The first is Direct Stock. So, this is my own website. So, I have a website, souvenirpixels.com. I used to host it on Squarespace. I currently host it on Smugmug and anybody can go on there and buy photos directly from you, photo licenses. So, this is, you know, companies will come on. A lot of travel companies travel magazines. They'll see my photos. Typically, they'll see my photos on social media and then on my social media, it links back to my website where they can just go on and purchase licenses. Also, on my website, you can purchase prints. So, I sell prints on my website now. I also have uploaded my photos to a lot of print-on-demand sites and I've tried out a bunch of them, but the only one that I've really had great success with is Fine Art America. So, most of my photos are on Fine Art America and I've made, you know, some money from those as well too. You can see here about 8%. But the vast majority of the money that I've made selling my photos online has been from microstock sites. So, I've tried a lot of different sites, about 23 of them in total and that really makes up the majority of my revenue selling my photos online. So, to go in and look at which sites in a bit more detail, you can kind of see in this pie chart. So, this is kind of breaking out the revenue from all the sites. So, you can see by far, this pink bar here is Shutterstock and they have by far been the best site for me for selling my photos online. I had a very good run with Shutterstock. You know, if you typed in landscapes in Shutterstock, I had a photo on the main page. If you typed in Canada, I had multiple photos on the first page. So, I did really well year over year and month over month on Shutterstock. Now, over the past six months, the search algorithm has seemed to change a little bit and my sales have gone down a little bit, but I had a pretty good run where about three years I was doing very well with them. The second one here is 500px. Now, 500px was a photo sharing community before they started selling in stock and I was involved in the community before it was selling in stock. So, I had a lot of photos that were highly ranked and when they started selling photos for stock as well too, I made quite a bit of money when they first started out. Now, there's been a lot of changes over there at 500px. They were purchased by another company. Now, all the sales are through Getty and to be honest, I don't even post it anymore. There's been a lot of changes and I just really don't appreciate the site as much as I used to. But, you know, for a period of time, they were a very good earner for me as far as sites go. Down here at number three is Photodun. Now, Photodun has really only earned me a lot of money in the last couple of years. The first couple of years, it was very low and the last two years really, it's been very high. So, I see Photodun really going and surpassing 500px, probably this year. And then the fourth one here is Adobe Stock or Fotolia. So, Fotolia was an independent stock site and then Adobe bought them and turned it into Adobe Stock. So, I had my portfolio on Fotolia and I did fairly well there and now it's moved over to Adobe Stock and when it moved over to Adobe Stock, I saw a bit of a dip in sales but now I'm starting to see it pick up a bit more maybe because I'm posting a bit more to Adobe Stock as well too. Now, there's some other smaller ones here. One thing to know is this little sliver up here. This is about $400 and that's 13 sites. So, I tried a lot of sites. I often what I'll do is when I hear about a new site, I'd upload like 200 photos to that site and see what happens and a lot of time nothing happened, right? Which one of the reasons I'm making this video, right? Because I spent a lot of time uploading and trying to find these sites, uploading those sites and really didn't get that much out of it. 13 sites, $400 over six years is not a lot. So, if I were starting it again, I would probably really just focus on the main sites that you see here and really not even worry about the smaller ones until they seem to be big enough to get some momentum because there are a lot of stock sites out there but I just don't think you can make a lot of money on all of them. You really need to have your photos on the big ones to start out with. Now, I hope that didn't come across as bragging but I had no idea when I started selling my photos online that I would make $35,000 from them. Really, my goal of doing this was so that I could buy more cameras and lenses without taking it to my family budget. And I achieved that and I'm pretty happy with it. Now, there was a point when I considered trying to maybe go full-time as a stock photographer but at the time, what was selling primarily was business images. So, what I realized was that to be able to be a full-time stock photographer, I would need to go and get models and kind of pose them in different business situations, taking hundreds of photos a day and uploading them and that really didn't appeal to me. If you take a look at my portfolio and I'll put some links down in the description, I really like taking travel and landscape photography and I think what I realized was it would be very difficult to make a full-time salary and support my family on stock photography if I was only going to do travel and landscape. The other thing is that I enjoy my day job. I enjoy software development. I enjoy working with my clients. So, I kind of feel like even if I did photography as a full-time job, I would probably just become a software developer, would become my hobby and I still code in my part-time. So, I decided to stick with software development as my main living and photography is my hobby. Now, you may have different goals and hopefully this video is still useful, the stats that I showed even though I kind of really only work on a part-time. Now, the start of the video, I mentioned that at the end, I would talk about which sites I see being the best in the upcoming year. Now, about five months ago, I tried uploading some of my photos to free stock sites. Now, if you aren't familiar with these free stock sites, there's sites like Pexels, Pixabay, Upsplash is another one where you can upload your photos and then anybody can use them for free, commercial purposes for free. So, they're stock sites, but you don't get paid. But the thing is, when someone downloads them, the sites encourage that person to give you a donation for the photo. So, I just did as a trial, uploaded 100 of my photos, 100 of my oldest photos. That weren't really making me money on any of the stock sites anyways. And in the past three months, I've made about $60 in donations. Now, listen, that's not a lot of money, but $60 is more than I made from a lot of the lower sites that I have out there. And as my sales go down on shutter stock, I plan on taking more of my, you know, older images and uploading to these sites. And I think they could be a fairly decent size, you know, revenue source for this year. So, that's something that you may want to look into as well. Again, I haven't made a lot of money off in the past, but it's something that I'm going to be trying more in the future. You can let me know in the comments what you think about these free stock sites. Now, you found this video useful. Make sure you go and hit the like button below, as well as hit the subscribe and the bell so you can get notified when I upload new videos. Happy uploading.