Arrow Photography London

How to make money as a photographer, part 2

Added 2024-11-02 17:17:26 +0000 UTC

Part 2, pay sites.

I asked myself some time ago when I was rooting through old hard discs “what the hell am I going to do with all this content?” I suspect you’re like me and have TBs of images going back a few years in some cases and a LOT of years in other cases.

Only Fans

My first foray into pay sites in an attempt to monetise this work was Only Fans. For some reason OF managed to corner the market, despite a backend program and platform that operates like a kid made it in his bedroom in the mid 90s. How they got so big with such a buggy site is beyond me, anyhoo…. I’m meandering. Regardless of your feelings OF is the biggest site with the most traffic and users but for the photographer it has a few problems.

1.     The clients on OF really aren’t just collecting images, a lot like the chat function and they newly termed “Girlfriend Experience” – of course this suits models perfectly, hairy men with cameras less so.
2.     As a photographer you will be required to upload full model releases together with date of birth, proof of ID etc. While some of you may already do this, I don’t and have never done except where a model has asked for some kind of release or when I’ve been submitting stuff for publication. In my case this immediately rendered my whole idea fairly useless, as I had no way to go back over 13 ish years of work and retrospectively get all that info, so it would only have been the newer stuff going forward which from a volume perspective was too restrictive
3.     How photographers are treated – I had a spectacularly poor support experience, the whole site is geared towards models and any issues or problems I had were met with a “why are you even here?” attitude – maybe that’s changed, maybe it was just me. But I never felt welcome there and I was eventually banned due to their ruling on number 2 above. They gave me 48 hours to provide releases and ID for everyone in my images, conservatively around 100+ models, never gonna happen. They wouldn’t delete the content, or let me back on to delete my content so just removed me after 48 hours oh and kept about £200 I was waiting for In payouts, so yeah..not a fan.
4.     The porn connotations, mention Only Fans to pretty much anyone and they will say “oh, the porno site?”. Rightly or wrongly it has a reputation, and a clientele that is less than bothered about seeing a fantastically lit mono art nude portrait, that stuff rarely gets traction and will be met with cries of “yeah mate, where’s the dildos??”

So to sum up, Only Fans = great for models, less than ideal for photographers looking to monetise a back catalogue

Score for photographers 1/10

Your own web site

I have my own web site www.arrowphotos.co.uk, I don’t keep it that up to date but if you happen across it you’ll find a collection of some of my best work and links to my socials etc. I treat it much more as a shop window, or advertising banner. Gives me some additional street cred and proves I exist outside social media. For anyone interested the site is created in Adobe Portfolio, which you get for free with a creative cloud licence and im always surprised the number of people who don’t know this!

It's perfectly possible to sell content on your own via your own website however the question is always reputation and traffic. Does someone trust www.imaphotographeripromise.com enough to give it money, and where is your traffic coming from? Again some models with big followings will have their own website but 99% of cases it’s like me, to have a presence and to push people to other places.

Score for photographers 5/10 but you would have to put some serious effort into marketing yourself, working out a payment provider, having some kind of support service etc…it’s why not a lot do it.

Services like Bentbox

Full disclosure I’ve never used one of these sites, but the premise is always the same, you create a collection of images and you sell that collection. This isn’t a bad idea if you want to overcome the reputation, payment, and support issues of running your own site. It’s a decent halfway house but you STILL need to market this. People are not going to just happen across your content. It’s not like browsing a supermarket and going “oh that looks nice, lemme have a taste”. The reality is that without the marketing aspect or a means to drive traffic you are to all intents and purposes setting up an ice cream stand, in a field, in winter and hoping people find you.

Score for photographers 6/10

Patreon

Ok I’m totally biased here but if you are reading this then Patreon works!

After the OF debacle, I realised I’d never properly looked at Patreon. So, I did and found the following

1.     The platform is a dream, well coded and with lots of features for creators
2.     It’s well established among a whole host of genres and has no “porny” overtones
3.     It’s reliable, respected and welcomes artistic 18+ content of the type I love to provide. It will even allow X++ rated content as long as it has artistic merit, but this is all largely self-policed. My view is don’t take the piss.

The only downside for me (and you’ll know, as you’re here) is video, I get that hosting video on their platform could be very expensive in terms of storage but the link with vimeo just doesn’t work. So hopefully my model of putting stuff in dropbox works but It is a pain, I have so much video content I’ve never loaded here as I just forget to do it, while adding it directly into a post would be a dream. I believe that function is coming at some point, I cannot wait.

Other than that, I love it, I love the fact I can create tiers, and offer different options. I can post things publicly; people can now join as FREE members which is a tier on its own that I can target directly, I can write articles like this, create collections.

You’ll probably see that I had to raise my pricing here as I found people were stealing my work and putting it out on various forums. That’s pretty impossible to stop so I figured I may as well make it a little more expensive for people to do it. But that’s an internet problem, not a Patreon problem. No matter how hard we work (and models too) people will always try to get to see your stuff for free, bastards – that’s all I’ve got on the topic.

Score for photographers 9/10 (I’d up it to 10 once they sort video out)

Driving traffic to these sites and getting money out of people

Honestly, getting money from people is HARD, I mean that’s the whole point of this post and I suspect you’re reading this as you find exactly the same. I recently had a model who I know drives a Lamborghini ask me to pay for studio time for a shoot she asked me to do, I declined. That’s still marginally easier than getting pseudo random people to give you money for stuff like this. It’s exactly the same answer as I gave about getting paid by models. Do you have something of value that people are willing to pay for?

Again, you know what I have here but let me reiterate it. Images alone I don’t think are enough to sustain a Patreon. I recently started added tuition videos and I’ve always written articles like this. I realised that I had stuff that people wanted – knowledge! So, you need to know what your thing is, what are you offering and would you pay for it?

The content stuff is the little steady income, probably 10% of my Patreons join the tuition and photographers tier, the bulk of people are the base tier. For that they still get all these articles, all the content. They just don’t get the presets and tutorials that come with the other packages. Other than that I treat everyone here the same, I have people on the base tier asking me questions all the time and I give the same depth of answer as anyone else. If someone reaches out to me on Instagram with a question I’ll happily answer it there too, I’ve not yet moved to a “if you want to talk to me pay me” model.

I do this as it’s part of my brand, part of the person I decided I wanted to be. If I could be described in a few words, I’d hope people would use words like helpful and supportive. There’s very little support for photographers out there, so I try to do what I can and give back what I can. I’ve found being generous in other areas means people are more likely to subscribe here.

Driving traffic here is still a pain, even for the mighty Arrow! My footfall here comes 99.9% exclusively from Instagram.

I currently have 173,00 followers, of those I suspect a good 30,000 are bots, and 40,000 people who randomly followed me for no reason. So in theory I’ve got 100,000 followers who are fairly genuine and who followed me originally as they liked my photography. Of those my monthly interaction is probably 30% of that number, so my work reaches maybe 30-40k a month. Mostly due to constantly being shadowbanned on the gram.

Even so, I have usually around 100 followers on here, a mix of tiers and free vs paid. That’s a 0.1% conversion rate from my followers. Let that sink in. I mean I have no idea if yours would be better or worse but that’s mine! I suspect if I made the base tier the cheapest I can (£3 I believe) then I’d get more followers but I believe in my value and I’d rather sell myself at a price I fell I am worth.

Patreon I think is a little harder sell than OF to people mainly as OF is pretty anonymous whereas Patreon doesn’t anonymise user names and email addresses, so I usually know who people are. Plus, I think that puts off some people who are married, have a GF etc and don’t want to be seen to be supporting someone like me!