Comments on: Freerange Stock: AdSense Revenue Sharing for Photographers

By: Viva Photography

Viva Photography — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 06:43:29 +0000

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!

By: DW Stock Photography

DW Stock Photography — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 06:41:48 +0000

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!

By: Michael Martine

Michael Martine — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 18:22:45 +0000

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.

By: Chance

Chance — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 23:54:52 +0000

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.

By: Eric Giguere

Eric Giguere — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 23:26:28 +0000

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…

By: Scotch

Scotch — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 20:41:08 +0000

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.

By: Eric Giguere

Eric Giguere — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 19:50:04 +0000

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.

By: Scotch

Scotch — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 19:21:21 +0000

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.