I’m curious what your thoughts would be on this one. I was always in the camp that “being on Facebook / Instagram (or any other platform) is not enough”. However ridiculous it may seem, one day these platforms may change their rules not in our favor, or stop existing at all. Ongoing outage of Facebook, Instagram and related Apps (like Whatsapp) due to huge personal data leakage (through scraping) supports that argument in an anecdotal way, but it also left many people without any web presence (if the traffic is not converted to the website traffic). And, of course, FB services will be back, probably sooner than later, but these incidents will happen, and all our data are more vulnerable, when aggregated in one place.
I’m wondering what’s your take on this - is your website your main web presence? Or is it an addition to Instagram / FB, etc.?
Hi, I see it differente, one thing is my presence in the WEB and other thing is my presence in social networking. For social of course IG and FB are the kings, but for web I expect to reach a different audience, with a different quality. That is why I am here, also in Flickr (which I use as my databse, I upload all my pictures there), and 500px. Also my Webpage is very useful, for my portfolio and for my blog. If you have any other recommendation, you are welcome. Cheers from Chile!
I like to maintain a website, because I can better control how my images are presented. I subscribe to the Adobe photography plan, so I can use Adobe Portfolio for my website, which I think does a very nice job. I use social media like FB, IG, and Twitter too. But I think they’re useful only as a way to drive people to your site, where they can clearly view all of your images, read your blog, learn about you, contact you, etc.
My first question would be, what is the purpose of putting up your images? For the pleasure of the viewer or as an attempt to make income? If for the pleasure of the viewer, then spend what you wish in time and money to show them off. If the purpose is to make income, don’t expect much.
I was at the Bosque del Apache Crane Festival in 2019 where reps from major manufacturers were in attendance with all their equipment you could take into the field to try out, as well as people pushing workshops and peripheral products. I asked a few if it was worth trying to sell images online. They all said no, there was little money to be made retailing online as a nature photographer. The people maaking a living at landscape or naature were giving workshops or working with interior designers making sterile PS transformed images.
Further, to that point, one of the PS “YouTube Gurus”, I don’t remember which, went over his income for the year in a YouTube. Despite his reputation and channel growth, he only sold 3 prints in a years time. It didn’t even cover the cost of his online presence.
Taking these events into account I have stopped any FB, IG, 500pix etc. type sites, or sales from my Smugmug pages, because I prefer upgrading equipment than pay to play webmaster to a dead product.
That is what brought me to NPN. At least I have the possibility of getting into a rewarding discussion with other like minded and like skilled amateurs about something I am passionate about.