[Pro] Earning a little cash from a site

Freeway
1

Me again, I’m not the greatest photographer in the world but have a reasonable selection of images - being a designer I know just how useful it is to get free images for small budget projects so I’m thinking of setting up a site from which anyone can download a hi res pic’ … any advice please.

I thought I’d offer folk the opportunity to ‘donate’ something for the use if they feel generous enough and have also heard about opportunities to get revenue through Google Adsense or “pay per impression” and stuff.

Forgive me if this is a little too off-topic but you guys are so ‘worldly’ when it comes to all things ‘interweb’.

Roger

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2

Choose a hosting company like DreamHost that doesn’t punish you for
high bandwidth usage. All those downloads will suck an ordinary
hosting plan dry. Or use a regular hosting plan, but stash the
originals on S3 and link to them from there. (That latter approach has
the added benefit that the files will always be served to the end user
– anywhere in the world – by a host that’s geographically near them.)

Use good compression technique. Enough compression to get the file
size down, not so much that the files are useless on delivery. I’ve
been consistently amazed at the file sizes from PhotoDisc (now Getty
something or another) nary a mangled edge in sight, yet a big 300ppi
file can often be in the mid hundreds of K. Truly astounding.

Plan for good tracking of which images “sell” – make an automated
donate button with PHP that grabs a relevant part of the URL so you
can see which images inspire donations, and do more of those. Plan
your URL scheme before you design anything, in fact, so that you can
keep things organized and so these sorts of research questions can be
answered without a lot of hacking later.

There’s more, I’m sure, but these will start you off.

Walter

On Jun 3, 2009, at 2:59 AM, Roger Burton wrote:

so I’m thinking of setting up a site from which anyone can download
a hi res pic’ … any advice please.

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3

All excellent suggestions thanks Walter, glad I asked so that I can “Plan the url scheme” … good of you - Roger

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4

I’d be a little wary of the donation scheme as some may take advantage of it - ie. not donate! But it’s probably best to trial and error to see if it works.

With regards to hosting, I use one.com and they boast unlimited bandwidth but I’ve never truly pushed the boundaries so don’t know how far that extends.

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5

Go no further than : Overview | PhotoShelter

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6

Good point Fergus and John-Paul, I’ll certainly check that site out - I might add that I am looking at this exercise as a way of improving my website building knowledge but I’ll probably end up going to photoshelter when banging my head against the wall in frustration at my own incompetence begins to hurt too much !

Regards Roger

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7

Are you meaning limited transfer limits? (bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (bits/second) that can be transmitted along a channel)

You can walk the whole of the population of China through a door 2.5" wide one person at a time. This door has got unlimited transfer limits. But It would take a long long time.

Unlimited transfers does not mean large bandwidth for lots of large downloads.

The best option is Walts S3 servers

On 3 Jun 2009, 3:25 pm, Fergus T wrote:

one.com and they boast unlimited bandwidth

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8

I think that a lot of hosting providers refer to a data transfer quota
as a bandwidth limit, I agree – it’s a messy mischaracterization of
the actual term. When I was originally writing the answer, that was
what I was referring to.

For the money, I think S3 is the way to go, too. It’s dead easy for
you and very very fast for the user. To put your files there, use
Transmit. To get a link to the file, simply select it in the Transmit
file list and press Apple-C. When you paste in a text editor or
Freeway’s Hyperlink dialog, you will see a complete public link to
that file, like this one:

http://freewaycast.s3.amazonaws.com/34/file_49c5eb40ae12f/DJ-FWP-Fading_Slideshows_SC.mov

Walter

On Jun 4, 2009, at 1:23 PM, WebWorker wrote:

Are you meaning limited transfer limits? (bandwidth is the maximum
amount of information (bits/second) that can be transmitted along a
channel)

You can walk the whole of the population of China through a door
2.5" wide one person at a time. This door has got unlimited transfer
limits. But It would take a long long time.

Unlimited transfers does not mean large bandwidth for lots of large
downloads.

The best option is Walts S3 servers

On 3 Jun 2009, 3:25 pm, Fergus T wrote:

one.com and they boast unlimited bandwidth

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9

Sometime around 4/6/09 (at 13:23 -0400) WebWorker said:

Unlimited transfers does not mean large bandwidth for lots of large downloads.

True. However, Dreamhost’s throughput (with its unlimited
“bandwidth”/storage) has seemed fairly responsive in the 3+ years
I’ve used it.

k

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10

Just to clarify a little more Walter, is S3 a generic name or are you specifically referring to Amazon S3 ? and, I must admit, (having looked into it a little further since reading your first answer) I’m not really sure what you mean by “URL scheme” - many thanks and have a good weekend Roger

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11

is S3 a generic name or are you specifically referring to Amazon S3 ?

Yep, that would be Amazon S3.

k

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12

Hi Roger,

I don’t think a donate button would be helpful in generating a little
cash. After all the site is costing something to run assuming its a
site you are going to run yourself. I would think of a creative
marketing model that can make you spare cash. You would need to put
your thinking cap on. Maybe buy one photo and get 9 free. Or set up
some sort of creative discount scheme attractive to buyers. A flat
registration fee, 10 for 1, low res free, high res charge for, sell
other peoples images, put advertsing on the site or what ever, maybe
using Mal’s OS commerce discounts which is very easy to set up in
Freeway. i.e. anything but give it away 100% free, after all the
objective is to make a little cash.

Also think of this, an army of little sites all taking a little cash
and is much better that one large site taking a little cash. So if you
can think creatively about the things you do best, there are still
many niches out there on the web to earn some money.

David Owen :: Freeway Friendly Web hosting and Domains ::

http://www.ineedwebhosting.co.uk :: http://www.webdesignquote.me

On 3 Jun 2009, at 07:59, Roger Burton wrote:

Me again, I’m not the greatest photographer in the world but have a
reasonable selection of images - being a designer I know just how
useful it is to get free images for small budget projects so I’m
thinking of setting up a site from which anyone can download a hi
res pic’ … any advice please.

I thought I’d offer folk the opportunity to ‘donate’ something for
the use if they feel generous enough and have also heard about
opportunities to get revenue through Google Adsense or “pay per
impression” and stuff.

Forgive me if this is a little too off-topic but you guys are so
‘worldly’ when it comes to all things ‘interweb’.

Roger

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13

Yes, S3 is Amazon Simple Storage Service. It’s the “net drive” taken
to its logical conclusion. Cheap, universally available, entirely un-
fillable (and unflappable).

There are a few good articles on A List Apart about designing your
URLs. Basically, what I mean is think about your users, think about
Google, make a system that can help them find their way:

/photos/categories
/photos/categories/puppies
/photos/categories/puppies/very-hungry-with-big-eyes
/photos/categories/kittens
/photos/categories/fallling-down-barns/
/photos/categories/abandoned-canal-locks

Now that I look back at that example, you could remove categories all
the way down, it’s meaningless and it doesn’t add anything.

But aside from that, see how each segment of the URL refines what your
customer is looking for? This adds keywords to your pages (for Google)
for FREE, and it makes the site more navigable for someone who is
browsing, because they are making a series of measured steps rather
than a huge leap that presupposes that they understand the shape and
scope of your content. Plus, that gets you more clicks for your
AdWords and so forth. If you build the entire thing in a CMS (even a
very simple one) you will get to make a deeply-nested URL scheme that
matches your data model without too much extra effort. Once you have a
few templates made, the data builds the whole thing, so you’re not
sitting there adding pages and folders in Freeway. Even if your CMS is
stuck in the dark ages of “querystring” URLs, there are server tricks
you can use to un-twist them into something human-readable like the
above. Google “friendly URLs”, or read the article on A List Apart: How to Succeed With URLs – A List Apart

For someone who is searching, you can make their current location in
the hierarchy part of the search equation, so someone who was in /
photos/puppies would see more weighted results for dogs than cats.

And for your donations, if the kitties out-“sell” the puppies, well
you know where that’s leading…

Walter

On Jun 5, 2009, at 1:55 AM, Roger Burton wrote:

Just to clarify a little more Walter, is S3 a generic name or are
you specifically referring to Amazon S3 ? and, I must admit, (having
looked into it a little further since reading your first answer) I’m
not really sure what you mean by “URL scheme” - many thanks and have
a good weekend Roger

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14

On 4 June2009, at 1:23 PM, WebWorker wrote:

You can walk the whole of the population of China through a door
2.5" wide one person at a time. This door has got unlimited
transfer limits.

FYI, actually, you can't do this.

People are born in China faster than you can get them through the

doorway. You can’t get the entire population through. The line
would just keep getting longer and longer.

							Peter

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15

People are born in China faster than you can get them through the doorway.

What if they run? :wink:

k

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16

On 6 Jun 2009, at 19:26, Keith Martin wrote:

What if they run? :wink:

The men run faster than the women; it was ever thus …

best wishes,

Paul Bradforth

http://www.paulbradforth.com

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17

You guys are so funny … you’ve made my Saturday evening … Roger

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