 All right, in this video, I'm going to go over my May stock photography report. And May was actually a really good month for me. It was my best month of the year. Not only was it my best month of the year, but it was actually also almost double my second best month for the year. So got a lot of good news to go over today. I'm going to jump right into it and kind of get into the report. Now my best site for May was Fine Art America. I made like $128 on two sales of my prints on Fine Art America. And that's really good for me. You know, I do often get, you know, one print sale a month. You know, I don't get them very often. And it's normally like every other month. So getting two in one month is really good. Getting two very large print sales in one month is amazing. So that's $128. Let me show you quickly, you know, exactly how much I'm making and how have my Fine Art America set up since it was a good month. So I'm just going to go through here and show you my sales. So the way that you set up Fine Art America is you can go through and basically choose how much money you make on top of whatever the costs are for the sale. So somebody can go on there by my photos and Fine Art America hails everything. They print it to them, they ship it to them. And I basically just set my own commission. So I've got my commission set for the largest size prints, which are the ones that are 60 inches. So this one here is 60 by 40. I've got it set to $70. So you can see for this particular photo, I have the normal price with $70, but there was a 20% discount for that month. So basically they took $14 off as part of the discount. Everything gets discounted. You can't really control that. All you can do is, you know, raise your prices when they do discount. But I don't think it's really worthwhile. They don't get sales during discounts that often for it to be worthwhile going in and updating it. So that was one metal print. It was a 60 by 40, which is amazing. You know, it's amazing to me that somebody prints off a 60 by 40 of one of my photos and puts them on their wall. That's a reward in itself. So this extra money is just more on top of that. And I also had this photo here, which was, again, another 60 by 40. But this was like a gallery wrap. And this one wasn't with the discount. So those are two $70 sales. So this is how I go through and kind of show you that because those are the types of things that I am selling on Fine Art America. You can kind of see here, I'll scroll through. So I often get questions in the comments about, you know, what sales, you know, what types of things sell. And you can kind of see here, for the most part, that the landscape photos that I take. So landscape and travel photos I find do fairly well on Fine Art America. So next on the list is Shutterstock. I actually had a pretty good month for Shutterstock last month with $87. Again, that's my best month for the year for Shutterstock as well. So again, May was a pretty good month for me. The top two sites did quite well. Now for Shutterstock, most of that was one photo sale. I had one photo sale that was more than $60. So somebody must have bought like an extended license for that particular photo. And that was the majority of my sales. So I don't expect to see Shutterstock this high every month. It was pretty much just an average month for Shutterstock with one $60 sale. But that $60 sale pushed me out from like $30 or $40 that I've been making regularly to $87. So that's how that happened. And you can see here, it also brought the revenue per download up, right? So with Shutterstock, you know, you get a lot of 10 cent sales, a lot of $2 sales. But then when you have a large sale like $60, you know, we're only getting 53 sales a month. It really pulls up your revenue per download for that. So that, you know, pulled up to about $65. Next on the list was deposit photos, pretty average month for deposit photos, 46 sales for, you know, about $32. Next was CanStock Photo. Again, another site that typically, you know, I only see, you know, $2 to $5 a month on CanStock Photo. But again, one large sale there, I think it was like $18 of that, came from one sale. Or actually, no, that was only, sorry, looking at this again. $23, that was all one sale. So one sale must have been an extended license on CanStock Photo. And that was $23. So again, something that doesn't happen every month, but again, came through in May. Next is Adobe Stock. So Adobe Stock, $21, which is about average for Adobe Stock for me this year. So nothing big there. However, something interesting did happen with Adobe Stock that I want to talk about in a bit more detail. So if you go to your Adobe Stock, if you do use this, I'm gonna go and take a look here. Adobe Stock has decided to set up a free section. Well, actually, not that they decided to set up a free section. They think they've had a free section on their website for a while where they have photos for free. But what they've decided to do is start paying their existing contributors to add some of their photos to the free section. And so what they've done is they've gone through and nominated photos that can be added to the free section. Now, this I'm sure is in response to the success of sites like Pexels and Upsplash that I talk about in this channel a lot where basically there's these sites that give photos away for free. And I'm sure that Adobe has been monitoring that closely. Getty recently bought Upsplash, one of Adobe's main competitors. And I think Adobe has looked at it and said, this is something that we need to do if we want to compete in the stock industry. So we need to have a much better free site set up. However, Adobe is one of the few sites that is actually paying you to add your photos to the free sites, okay? There are other sites that are paying you but they're much smaller sites. It's the first really big main site that's doing this. And what they're doing is, essentially the way that they're setting up, they're gonna pay you $5 for adding a photo to the free site for 12 months. And that's important. If you go through and look at the Learn More, take a look at it, is that you're not putting it on the free site indefinitely. You're putting on the free site for 12 months and you're getting paid $5 for that. Now, not anybody can upload to the free site either. You can't actually upload directly there. You have to upload your photos to Adobe Stock and then Adobe Stock goes through and nominates those photos. So it says you can put this in the free collection. So if you look here, 89 of my photos were nominated. So if all of these get accepted, then I get $450, okay? So I'm gonna go through and kind of show you how they're nominated and what I plan to do with this because I know a lot of you probably have photos on Adobe Stock and you're probably getting similar messages here. So the question is like, is it worth it, right? Like would I be better off just to keep my photos on Adobe Stock and sell them or put them on the free section? You know what I mean? And it really comes down to you. Do you think you're gonna make more than $5 off each of those photos over the next month, right? And it also gotta think about is putting them on the free section potentially gonna cannibalize your sales on the other sites like Shutterstock, meaning that if you move a photo over to the free section on Adobe for the $5, will you get lower sales on Shutterstock? So to answer that second question, I think the answer is no. I don't think you'll see a significantly lower sales on Adobe or on Shutterstock if you put them on Adobe. The reason is is I don't think stock buyers shop around that much. There may be a little bit going on, but I think most of these sales come from subscriptions and when they're sold on subscription, if somebody has a subscription to Shutterstock, even if they see it on Adobe, they may still buy it through their subscription just because then they know they're gonna get from Shutterstock, keeps it all in one place, okay? So I don't think that'll be the case. Now, obviously, if you add it to the Adobe free section, you're taking it out of the Adobe paid section. So you definitely will see less sales on Adobe or no sales on Adobe while it's in the free section for the next 12 months. So it's really kind of what you expect for it to be for those $5. So if you take a look at my photos here, what you can do is, I'm just gonna uncheck this. They've given you a new checkbox here for the Elable for the free section. So for that, you can easily go through and you can see all my photos here. So if you look at my most popular photos, none of those are Elable for the free section. The first photo that's Elable for the free section is this one here, this landscape photo where I've got 72 downloads. And this is a fairly popular photo for me on Adobe stock, right? And often these photo sales are larger, it's a larger file. So I do notice this photo gets sold a fair amount on Adobe stock. Interestingly enough, it doesn't get sold very much on Shutterstock at all, but Adobe stock, it seems to be a good photo for me. So in 72, you can kind of see here, where they're not letting you move all of them, right? So you can scroll down and most of the popular ones, they're not, right? The next one that I'm allowed to upload is this one with this 39, 27. And you can see here, so if you have that little checkbox, the little nominate box, that means you're allowed to nominate it. So as you can scroll through, I don't know how they came up for this. It looks pretty random to me. I suspect they have some sort of algorithm they're using some way here to test. Do you know what I mean? They wanna test out from their point of view too, how much they're going to make, right? Because obviously taking these photos off here, putting onto the free site, they're losing money on those sales as well too. So they've probably got an algorithm behind here that they're gonna test out how this is gonna work and then probably optimize that algorithm for future years, right? So you can scroll down and see, down here, seven of these photos, the ones that are available, okay? So what I'm gonna do is if you go here, I can go and you can show the ones that are eligible just by clicking on this checkbox. What I've decided to do is my most popular ones, the ones in the top row here, I think that I will get more than $5 in sales on these five photos on Adobe Stock over the next year. So I'm not gonna add those ones to the free section, all right? However, I am gonna add the rest of them. Some of these, this photo here, I've got 15 downloads on it, but this photo has been up here for five or six years, okay? So more than likely, I'm getting average three a year, I was actually getting a lot more than I am now. So I think I might only get $2 sales from this photo over the next year, so I am gonna add it as long as these ones. And I kind of, when it gets down here, some of these two photos, they're kind of a no-brainer, right? I haven't made $5 on Adobe with them yet. So I might as well add them down, the one downloads. And as soon as they've even chosen some that have zero downloads, this one I understand here because it's a photo that was taken recently, so maybe it's a good photo that just hasn't been in the search results so they wanna put it in the free site. But this photo and these photos, these have been up here for quite a while and not gotten any downloads, but they wanna add them to the free section, they're willing to give me $5 for these three photos added into the free section. So those ones that in my opinion are no-brainer, I doubt I would have made a sale on Adobe over the next year anyways, with those, so I'm gonna add them in, okay? So that's my plan to go through here. If you look at this, obviously this looks pretty good. Like in my Adobe earnings for this year, just under $100, okay? So if it's almost halfway through the year, I'm doing this up until May, so maybe, you know what I mean? I would have planned I'm making $200, $250 from Adobe this year and now Adobe is coming to me insane. I'll give them $550 if you add all these photos, okay? So I'm gonna go in, I'm gonna do this. I know a lot of people won't, I know a lot of people are gonna disagree with this thing and I'm happy to have that discussion down in the comments. But for me, an extra $400 from these photos, assuming they do get accepted, they don't commit to these being accepted. All they say is that you're nominating them and if they get accepted, they go through. I'll obviously post here what they get, but let's say I do get $400 for those. I'm looking to buy a new lens for the summer. I'm going out, gonna be doing a lot more photography. I wanna get a 50 millimeter, one for lens or a 40 millimeter, haven't decided which one yet, for the L-MEL camera system, right? I used to have a 50 for when I had Nikon, I moved over to L-MEL, haven't bought it yet and this is gonna pay for almost half of the lens, right? So from my point of view, this makes sense. I'm gonna go through it, but again, a lot of other people wouldn't, depends on the number of sales that you have. So that's my plan. I'm going to do that and then I'll update here how they get accepted and you'll obviously see these in my monthly revenue reports as well. All right, next on the list was Pexels. Again, not a great month for Pexels, but I haven't been uploading that recently. So I've kind of fallen down the ranks in Pexels. I'm still like in the top 100 all time, but if you look at like my last month, monthly performance, it's not great. So that's why, and the reason is I just haven't been out great taking many photos recently, just really not a lot of time more than anything else, but I have actually been planning a lot of photography trips over the summer is when I do a lot of my photography and I will be, you know, so I'll be, you know, getting back into taking a lot more photos, processing a lot more photos. And when I do that, I'll upload it to Pexels and I would expect my numbers to go up then once I do that. One, two, three, I off again, a pretty average month for them, Dreamstime, big stop photo, which leaves me with $200, $321. So before this, my biggest month was January, where I think I was like at around 170. So this was a really good month for me, but that being said, someone expected, I've said in past videos, if you follow along, a lot of the photography that I do, I do it in the summer. And so they're like summer landscapes and a lot of it is done during my vacations, right? I basically go on family vacations, we take photos and I come and I put them on the stock sites. So a lot of those stock photos are really useful to travel companies in the summer, right? So people that are, you know, planning their advertising campaigns for the summer are doing that in the spring. So you think about May, June is when I get a lot more sales. So this is pretty typical for this time of year. You know, maybe the fine art America isn't as typical because I got two photos up there, but the rest of them, you know, seeing a bit of a bump up in the other sites is pretty typical just because of the type of photography I do as well as the type of year it is. Anyways, hopefully you found that useful. Make sure if you did, you go and give the video a like. And best of luck selling your photos online.