Ahoj! This is Zdenka. Today's video won't
be
exactly a happy one. No sweet talk like
you see online
these days. How to make money quickly
with your photos! How to make 500 bucks
over the weekend with a camera?
Let's just cut that off. Today's video
will be
very real, as real as it gets.
And for the new faces, welcome. My name is
Zdenka Darula. If you want to learn how to
take better photos and videos with the
latest gear,
more about photography and video,
business and possibly participate in
creative camera challenges,
consider subscribing. Last few days I've
been thinking
about my revenue here on Youtube and
about my revenue
in general. As my channel is growing here
on Youtube,
my revenue is actually for past six
months going down.
It is down about 30% and it should be the
other way.
The channel is growing, the revenue
should be growing as well.
Affiliate marketing is down 50% for me in
last six months than it was actually six
months ago
and it can be for many reasons. First of
all
Youtube is now running ads on the
non-monetized
channels, then the economy situation, what's
going on in the world,
my planning of the content on the
Youtube which is generating less income.
It can be so many different things. But
I'm not worried about it, I'm not in a
point of
being stressed out or anything like that.
I do have also other income streams as
everyone should when it comes to
photography and video. You need to have
multiple income streams to be able to
make it
or live comfortably with it.
In today's video particularly I want to
talk about stock photography
and video. I have been doing stock since
2007.
Around 2009 to 2012 it was almost
full time for me at that time. Right now
I have 14,512
photos and some videos included in
the number
in my stock portfolio. That is many hours,
days, weeks of retouching,
keywording, uploading. I've spent some
serious time on that and I also
did invest in some of the photo shoots
because I was paying the models.
Then I opened up this Youtube channel
three years ago and I had to
slow down uploading to stock. Last photo
shoot I did specifically for stock
was in September 2018, so it's a little
over two years.
Very simply put I had to invest all my
time to Youtube if I wanted to do this
full-time eventually. So since
September 2018
I only uploaded until now 48 files. Some
photos and some videos and that's,
that's nothing. I would love to upload
there and I do have many files to upload,
but I'm
struggling with the time. I'm not an
exclusive contributor,
meaning, I don't only upload to
Shutterstock. I upload to 15 different
stock agencies.
I don't have all 14,512
files on all stock agencies, only on the
main ones.
I only try the other agencies to see if
it is worth uploading there,
so I definitely have less files in those.
I logged in into my accounts last night
and I reviewed everything
very carefully. I wanted to know how much
less of an income I actually have
since I haven't been uploading to stock
for over
two years. And we have a saying in stock
that you got to feed the beast. Meaning
that
it is a passive income but you're gonna
be pretty active
to get the the sales coming. Once you're
gonna stop, obviously it's gonna go down
but
the question is how fast and how much?
And you got to be active or you're
gonna refresh
once in a while to upload something to
keep reminding yourself and
that will pull your old photos and you
will see some sales here and there.
What I'm going to do, I'm going to review
each agency
in the order from the most selling ones
to the least selling ones. How much
percentage
did I lose? Which agencies are worth
working with in 2021 and which agencies
are worth refreshing your portfolio?
Which agencies are not worth
at all? And you bet that I'm going back to at
least refresh my stuff a little bit to
upload here and there because
these days it is so important to have
multiple
revenue streams with all what's going on
around us.
Number one is Shutterstock. Shutterstock
has always been the biggest
seller for me but ever since they
announced
the new reduced payout structure to
contributors,
the revenue was going down very
quick. If I compare to what I was making
on
average per month in 2018 to what I'm
making now,
I'm making 67 percent less. Number two.
Adobe stock formerly known as Fotolia.
I know better not to stop uploading to
Adobe Stock because first of all,
you make money with them and second of
all, if you upload 300 photos
and 300 videos by December 31st
then the next year you have the entire
Adobe Suite for free. That means
Photoshop,
Lightroom, Premiere pro, After Effects and
all that. You don't have to pay anything.
At least that's how it was up till now.
I'm not sure what they are doing
this year but that's how it was up to
now. With Adobe Stock
I lost 36% of income which is much less
than with Shutterstock. Number three is
123 Royalty Free. I actually
like 123
Royalty Free because their uploading
process.
It is very simple, it's very easy. You don't
spend that much time to submitting
your stuff with this agency.
I lost the most income. I lost 72%
out of all of these. Now, Shutterstock,
Adobe stock and 123 royalty
free
are the biggest players when it comes to
making income for me. They make me
the most money. Number 4 is Istock
by Getty. I used to love Istock
many many years ago. They were one of the
highest sellers for me, they were making
me
quite a bit of money but then the
ownership changed and all that and it
went pretty steadily downhill. Also, I
really don't like their system of
uploading photos.
You have to do that through this program
or app, it's very time consuming,
it's just, it takes forever. I don't like
it at all and
on top of it once in a while they reset
the login
so you can't really get to your account
and then I have to contact them,
go through all the security and it takes
for days. I had to do it last night.
So with Istock I lost the passion but
I also lost 43% of income.
Number 5 is Dreamstime.
Dreamstime has never really been a big
seller for me
but I'd say a steady seller, so it's
always been kind of similar income
and when I look at the statistics last
night, I actually only noticed that I
lost only 1%.
The numbers are pretty much the same
like two years ago when I was actually
uploading.
Number six is Deposit photos.
Deposit photos is interesting. I actually
looked at their stuff
over over last night many times. I
rechecked everything if I'm seeing right.
I gotta figure out what the heck is
going on but with them
the opposite happened. I'm actually
making 40%
more of income than I was making two
years ago.
I didn't upload anything, I don't know
if they featured me or if
they're just doing much better now,
they're doing my advertisement,
and stuff but
I'm selling more. I'm seeing 40%
increase.
Now these are my top six agencies where
I have my
majority of work there. Now, the following
agencies
I only have a portion of portfolio there.
Number seven
is Envato Marketplace. Now with this
agency I'm seeing strange things as well.
I'm actually seeing an increase of 25
percent
of income. Now to upload your stuff to
Envito marketplace is a little bit
time-consuming as well. They have two
separate
sites. One is for photos, this is
where you upload your photos. It's called
Photodune
and where you upload your videos is
called Video Hive.
Number eight is Big stock. Another loss
of income
is happening with Big stock photos and
it is 50%.
And now I'm going to list agencies which
are not worth
the time for me. With them I can
literally buy only
one cup of a coffee a year with their
earnings.
This is how much they are selling the
photos for me. I'm absolutely not gonna
continue with them
except one and that would be Pond 5.
I haven't been really uploading
videos there but I
keep hearing from other people that they
are doing pretty
well with them. So I might give it
another try. I'm gonna start uploading
videos there but definitely
not photos. Here it goes. Can stack photos.
I made enough with them to buy one
Starbucks coffee.
Crestock. I've made enough to buy one Tim
Horton's coffee.
Panthermedia, Zooner, Yay images
and Most photos proved me that I should
be
making my own coffee at home.
Works awesome. Two in one.
Coffee making and alarm.
Wakes the whole family. OK, those are
some interesting findings
based on all that. I'm going to continue
with agencies
Shutterstock, Adobe stock, 123 royalty
free,
Istock by Getty, Dreamstime, Deposit
photos,
Envato marketplace and Pond5. So I'm
cutting it down
to eight agencies instead of 15.
I'm going to continue with the video not
the photos.
Not for the reason that I don't want to
but for the reason that I have no time.
And since I'm already
creating a lot of videos for Youtube
instead of having the video just sit
on my hard drive
I might as well upload it there and see
if I can make some extra income.
Those losses are painful but that's
the reality. Still with the income I'm
making from stock
these days I can buy food for two weeks
for a family of
four here in Canada and food here in
Canada is not exactly cheap these days.
Depends where you live in which country
you could probably buy a lot more for
that.
One would expect that with portfolio
of 14,512 files
you would make a little bit more but
from my experience once I
refresh the portfolio, add some photos
and add some videos,
it will a little bit pull the old content
so I'm gonna
be making a little bit more again but
it's not gonna be as it used to be for
sure.
Stock has changed but still it's very
important for
photographers, videographers, creators to
have
many different streams of income. If you
found this interesting and perhaps an
eye-opener to some,
hit the thumbs up and subscribe to
future videos and
future updates. If you have any questions,
comments,
want to say anything about stock
agencies or add some stock agencies, feel
free to leave it
in a comment section below and I'll see
you my friends
in the next video. Cau... Ahoj...