Freerange Stock: AdSense Revenue Sharing for Photographers
Like me, you were probably deluged with emails bombarding you to buy Mike Filsaime’s latest creation. (I’m not.) But I also got a nice email from Chance Agrella, one of the folks behind Freerange Stock, a free stock photography site. They provide free photos that can be used for almost any purpose, such as on websites, in books, etc. The licensing terms are very liberal, you don’t even have to provide a photo credit if you don’t want to. They have some news of interest to my readers. And, oddly enough, it kind of goes along with the revenue-sharing post I made a couple of days ago.
Freerange Stocks makes its money through AdSense. They have just integrated the AdSense API into their site, which lets them share AdSense revenues with contributing photographers. Here’s what Chance said:
…bloggers who shoot photos and use AdSense or photographers who want to contribute can make Adsense income from giving away stock photos. The site gives 80% of the income generated by the contributors pages to the contributor, and if a user doesn’t have an AdSense account, the site will sign them up for one.
See the revenue sharing page for the full details.
This is a nice use of the API and very much what Google intended with its release. If you’re a photographer who has some pictures gathering dust that are worthy of monetization, why not submit them to the site and see what happens? (Note that pictures have to follow certain quality guidelines for submission and that they will be reviewed and approved by a human before being added to the system.)
Freerange Stock is looking for feedback from photographers, so feel free to send them your comments and suggestions, or just leave a comment here if you want and I’m sure they’ll read them. Here are some of my suggestions:
- Please properly capitalize the first ’s’ in “AdSense”. I hate seeing “Adsense”, especially a revenue-sharing site like this one. (Alright, I’m a nit-picker.)
- Drop the borders on the banner ads.
- Put in a horizontal link unit somewhere at the top of the page, near the navigation.
- Use section targeting to make sure that Google is focusing on the right parts of the page.
See also the AdSense optimization tips I did for ProductWiki. Let’s hope the AdSense API gets the contributors rolling in…
Sponsored Link: For a complete set of AdSense best practices, read Uncommon AdSense — for serious AdSense publishers only!
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
Tags
AdSense, AdSense API, Google, horizontal link unit, optimization, photographers, photography, revenue sharing
Comments
8 Responses to “Freerange Stock: AdSense Revenue Sharing for Photographers”
Eric – thanks for the info about Freerange Stock. I wonder if Chance can give any idea of how the contributors are doing from AdSense? My concern is that there’s very little variation in content because of the nature of the site, so visitors are going to see the same or very similar ads throughout the site.
I guess though if they’re looking for stock images and most the ads are for other stock photo sites, they may be tempted to click. Any comments or feedback from Chance would be appreciated. I’m reluctant to spend time loading images without some indication of how well the model is working.
I think the revenue sharing is very new, so I’m not sure they have much data.
The key to this working is in the metadata accompanying the pictures. They are being keyword tagged, and the few quick tests I did showed that relevant ads were being shown because of those keywords. I’m sure there’s more that can be done in this area, though, which is why I made some suggestions to them.
I’d probably just upload a few pictures myself and see how it works.
I agree that image keywording is crucial. I use the same software (PhotoStore) for a stock photo site and certainly in my case there is an option to add “description or other details” for each photo. I use it to add captions.
This is in addition to keywords, so I guess one could add at least a couple of sentences, including location where picture was taken or maybe even camera information – details that would in turn give AdSense crawlers something to latch on to.
As you say, I suppose the best is simply to try and see what happens.
Right, the more textual information that can be provided, the better. So having a description/caption in addition to tags is a great way to provide that information. You could even get users to participate in the captioning, I suppose, although frankly I don’t know what their incentive would be to do that…
Yes Eric, you’re right – I don’t have a ton of info about revenue performance. I have been running the non-revenue-sharing version of the site for a while with my own photos, so I’ve seen what I think is good performance. I think most AdSense (capital S!) publishers are reluctant to tell much about click through rates and eCPM, but the site does get an increasing amount of traffic and this should continue upwards as contributions come in.
Scotch – I’m sure you know that as with any stock photo site, some images are obviously more in-demand than others, so that will dictate ad impressions and clicks. If images are submitted with descriptions and and titles, these show along with keywords, so they do get indexed.
It also takes a bit of time for images to get found – there are several photo aggregating sites that index photos, and images appear in Google searches. Getting images indexed can take a while.
The other thing about this is, just like microstock photos and blogs, the greater your body of work the greater and more consistent your potential exposure. Content is still king.
What I really like about photos is there evergreen nature — there are lots new photos on the site, but there are also scans of 50 year old slides that get downloaded and used in blogs every day. Photos will never really expire in relevancy, so their impact and desirability stay fairly high. This can benefit the publisher, obviously.
Thanks Eric for the post, and thanks Scotch for the comments.
That site is a great idea! Man, you get one or two big hit images, who knows what you could earn? That is pretty cool. Thanks for pointing this out, Eric.
This is a great idea, I’m sure other will follow suite soon. Rewarding contributors with revenue sharing is a fantastic motivator to get your site growing.
Good luck!
Chance can you give us an update on how things have progressed with your site? Would be interested to know if you have been successful!