Image of my notes app, with some thoughts I’ve recently had about stock photography. It says:
For a couple of months, I've chucked some of my older images on Unsplash; try to get more eyes on my stuff and all that. In that time, I've had a fairly decent response, with the number of people viewing my images far exceeding the number viewing my images on sites I've been on for years (Flickr, I’m looking at you!), and more people downloading my images than I expected (to be clear, I expected 0 people to download my images).
For the most part, knowing that people are enjoying my images, and enjoying them so much that they are downloading them for their personal use, gives me the warm and fuzzies that one hopes to get when one shares their creations. Recently though, as I am battling with a government run agency that is supposed to help people but does everything in its power to avoid helping people, I find myself (a little selfishly perhaps) questioning the free stock model a little.
If for each download through Unsplash I received the 37p that Google tells me is the norm on sites such as Shutterstock (a site I tried a few years ago but they didn’t seem to market creators work anywhere near as effectively as Unsplash do), I could tell the government run agency to shove it where the sun don’t shine, as I would be earning from stock photography what I am supposedly entitled to receive from them. It would also cut out a great deal of stress from my life, and it’d give me some time to finally get back to creating images.
Image of my notes app, with some thoughts I’ve recently had about stock photography. It says:
For a couple of months, I've chucked some of my older images on Unsplash; try to get more eyes on my stuff and all that. In that time, I've had a fairly decent response, with the number of people viewing my images far exceeding the number viewing my images on sites I've been on for years (Flickr, I’m looking at you!), and more people downloading my images than I expected (to be clear, I expected 0 people to download my images).
For the most part, knowing that people are enjoying my images, and enjoying them so much that they are downloading them for their personal use, gives me the warm and fuzzies that one hopes to get when one shares their creations. Recently though, as I am battling with a government run agency that is supposed to help people but does everything in its power to avoid helping people, I find myself (a little selfishly perhaps) questioning the free stock model a little.
If for each download through Unsplash I received the 37p that Google tells me is the norm on sites such as Shutterstock (a site I tried a few years ago but they didn’t seem to market creators work anywhere near as effectively as Unsplash do), I could tell the government run agency to shove it where the sun don’t shine, as I would be earning from stock photography what I am supposedly entitled to receive from them. It would also cut out a great deal of stress from my life, and it’d give me some time to finally get back to creating images.
It was beyond my capabilities to turn it into threaded posts…
