Author Topic: do free photos help for sales ? (Read 6756 times)

vphoto · « **on:** November 13, 2007, 19:07 »

Anyone benefited from submitting free photos? I could no find them at DT, but they are at 123RF, where they are called donated.

vphoto

hatman12 · « **Reply #1 on:** November 13, 2007, 19:18 »

I am experimenting with this.

In October I 'donated' 48 images to the free section at 123RF and rotated them through various donation periods.

All my donated images came to an end on Nov 1st. I intend not to offer any donated images for the month of November.

So far my income in November is about the same as it was in October at the same stage in the month.

Early days, but the evidence so far is that withdrawing the free images has had no impact on portfolio sales.

sharply_done · « **Reply #2 on:** November 13, 2007, 22:19 »

Isn't one idea of giving stuff away for free to have it downloaded hundreds of times so that it has a very good search engine placement once you resume charging for it?

fotografer · « **Reply #3 on:** November 14, 2007, 00:53 »

I hadn't thought about that. I wondered why my fiotw at IS and my free image of the day at DT both went on to sell very well after being downloaded free 1000's of times. The one at DT is I believe in my top 10 sellers. (can't check at the moment as DT seems to be down.

Quote from: sharply_done on November 13, 2007, 22:19

Isn't one idea of giving stuff away for free to have it downloaded hundreds of times so that it has a very good search engine placement once you resume charging for it?

iofoto · « **Reply #4 on:** November 14, 2007, 11:17 »

iofoto is part of the stock.xchng community- currently have 17 images that have been downloaded over 20,000 times. The free images are a great way to support the designer community, build your links and brand, and eventually build sales. Really fun to see how designers enhance our photos and then use on their portfolio sites with links back to the photographer. (We also have a few free images on DT to help build sales.)

Here's our page on stock.xchng: http://www.sxc.hu/profile/iofoto

mangia · « **Reply #5 on:** January 05, 2008, 13:07 »

free photo = free
almost free = 1$

Where is the difference

fotografer · « **Reply #6 on:** January 05, 2008, 13:33 »

The difference being
1000s of Dls X 1$ = 1000s of $s
and
1000s of Dls X 0$ = 0$

madelaide · « **Reply #7 on:** January 05, 2008, 15:52 »

I guess the more correct math is:
1000 x $0 = $0
0 x $1 = $0

Free images would bring more people to your portfolio. Whether it helps sales or not is still a mistery to me.

Get an old, unselling image and put it free, that's what I thought. I did that last month in 123RF - 3 images of New Year 2007 that would probably be useless in 2008. They received some downloads (about 25 in total last time I checked), but I didn't observe any increase in sales (at least 123RF had smallest decrease). In fact I expected people would perhaps seek and buy my New Year 2008 images, but I didn't get any remarkable sales on those.

Regards,
Adelaide

yingyang0 · « **Reply #8 on:** January 05, 2008, 16:22 »

My BME was the month I had a free photo at IS, but from other people's graphs I think that was more connected to the overall site sales rather than the free image. The photo had no downloads the three months it was up, nor did the ones that were linked to it. While it was free the linked photos received a lot of downloads. After the main photo was no longer free it started getting paid downloads (it's up to 30 now).

I think there was a benefit, just not a huge one.

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Author Topic: do free photos help for sales ? (Read 6756 times)

vphoto

hatman12

sharply_done

fotografer

iofoto

mangia

fotografer

madelaide

yingyang0

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