The decision to make my photos available for free goes back to an article in English by Samuel Zeller on Medium, which has since been deleted but is still available on dpreview. I had read the article some time ago, and since Instagram is no longer what it once was, I decided to try my luck on Unsplash. Already the second image turned out to be a full success and made it into the curated homepage feed of Unsplash, bringing in an incredible 1.2 million views so far.
Views are defined as follows:
Every time a photo is loaded. So a view would be viewing it in single photo mode, if it comes up in the feed in a search result, if it loads on the screen when viewing a collection / the New feed ect. Also if it’s viewed like this in any of our API users applications - Medium for example.
Source: Unsplash Slack Channel
Today, I received the message for the third time already that one of my images made it onto the homepage.
Why I make my photos available for free
I do not know how many thousands of photos I take every year, but I will never be able to publish all of them. For that reason, and also for the reasons Samuel mentioned, I decided to make the images available for free. Because sharing is caring.