Three months ago, we decided to take Photography Life in a different direction. At a time when most websites shove increasingly aggressive ads into people’s faces, and many replace good writers with AI-generated garbage, we removed all third-party ads from Photography Life and invested even more in our articles.
Prior to making this change, about 80% of our yearly income was from ads (with most of the remainder coming from affiliate links). I don’t know who even clicks on advertisements, but somehow, they generate enough income to comfortably run a site as big as ours. It was very difficult to stomach turning off that revenue stream.
Still, it was even harder to watch our high-quality articles and reviews be displayed side-by-side with weird ads for diets, home refinancing, and whatever Temu is cooking up these days. Our website felt like it was turning into a spam page that loaded three times as slowly as it should. Photography education is already in a state of decline today, and we didn’t want to contribute toward that.
What were the alternatives? As useful as affiliate links are, that alone isn’t big enough to cover all our costs. Launching a product was a possibility, but we didn’t have anything ready immediately; our last big products were our photography video courses, which we already released for free during the pandemic. Most of all, we didn’t want to lock Photography Life’s wealth of knowledge behind a paywall. To me, that would be even worse than ads.
After extensive discussions with Nasim, the two of us decided to start selling a combination of things – personalized instruction, behind-the-scenes posts, early access to our lens tests, and other benefits like that. This would allow the most dedicated Photography Life readers to get more out of our website, without reducing the amount or quality of articles for everyone else (and actually increasing it).
With this in mind, we turned off ads at the start of 2024 and launched our Member Page a couple weeks later. It was one of the scariest things I’ve ever done, a step into the unknown with no real way back.
Now, three months later, I am thrilled to say that we have reached the landmark of 1,000 Photography Life Members as of today! Not all of our Members are part of our paid Silver or Gold tiers, but even our Free Members are supporting Photography Life and helping us reach more visitors. We’re now in the top 10 biggest photography pages on all of Patreon and continuing to climb.
Today’s article is just to say my sincere thanks. It means a lot to know that we could switch away from the ad-based approach and have over 1,000 readers follow. Perhaps fewer people read blogs these days, and not as many cameras are sold as they were ten years ago, but you all make up for it with dedication.
I’m working on a variety of Member Page projects right now, including the first of our Online Workshops and the option to buy a yearly subscription at a discount (rather than monthly). I had hoped to time the launch of our yearly membership to coincide with our 1,000th Member, but Patreon is making us jump through a few more hoops before yearly is an option. I’ll enable it as soon as it’s available on our end.
Anyway, if it weren’t for the support from our readers like you, we wouldn’t be able to continue this experiment at all. Thank you for sticking with us! Photography Life has some really exciting days ahead, and I hope you’ll look forward to it as much as I do.
