By Historians and economists say that our civilization has gone through three great revolutions throughout history, the agrarian, when our ancestors discovered that they could control the fruit of the earth by sowing the seeds of some vegetable, the industrial one, when we discovered that we could be able to produce mass products through industrial processes and that of knowledge, where the way we create, store, organize and market information and ideas for transforming the way wealth is generated and distributed. This revolution is the greatest event that our generation can be part of and is happening here and now, right in front of our noses. Just look at the type of products marketed by the 500 largest companies in the world, 30% of them market intangible products such as financial services, banking services, software and telecommunications. In addition, the intangibles have great advantages i.e. production costs are usually low, and it is not necessary to have large physical space to store them, and they are not things that can be stolen at least not in the traditional way and some of them are easy to manipulate and deliver. Without a doubt, marketing intangibles has great advantages, and SMEs are no exception. Here we mention an option, of hundreds that possibly exist, how we can do business using the internet of digital photography.
The Business of Digital Photography
The Internet and websites grow at rates of 36% a year. There is a popular phrase that perfectly describes the justification of this business, love is born from sight. It is proven that human beings think and remember mainly in images, and that most of the times we make purchasing decisions based on what we ‘imagine’, that is, the benefits that will give us a product and websites are no exception. The more attractive they are to be seen, the more likely they are to fulfill their duties. Digital images and photos are then used for multiple purposes i.e. embellish websites, illustrate content, generate online presentations or visually make more attractive technical documents and specifications. However, digital photos are also used offline to generate printed materials such as brochures and presentation sheets and for advertising in magazines and print media, which gives us a wide range for this type of product.
Turning the Hobby of Photography into a Business
There are multiple sites where you can do business today. Among them are dreamstime.com, canstockphoto.com and bigstockphoto.com.
From here on we will refer to these sites as ‘the company’ and the interested people in the business as ‘the photographer’, and as ‘customer’ to anyone who buys a digital photograph for use on their website or in some printed material. The objective of the companies is to market the photographs, collect the same and divide the profits with the photographer. The business works as follows;
- The photographer creates an account in which his profits will be accumulated and uploads his photographs to the server of the company, retaining the copyright on them. Photographs must meet certain quality requirements to be approved and made available to customers.
- Each time a user buys and downloads a photograph, the photographer receives a commission ranging from 25% to 50% of the transaction, which regularly starts at $1 per image. The same picture can be sold more than once, even thousands of times. However, there are cases in which the client requires to use the photo for some printed material. In this case, the cost rises between $20 and $100 per image. Finally, there is the possibility that the client requires the exclusivity of the photograph or the rights of the same. In this particular case, this exclusivity costs from hundreds to thousands of dollars.
- When the photographer’s account accumulates an agreed amount of the commissions which varies from company to company, the photographer can ask the company to send his money by means of a check or PayPal account, PayPal is an international company that allows us to receive payments from anyone in the world and transfer money to any account.
Advantages of the Business of Digital Photography
This business has multiple advantages such as the following;
- The investment required is minimal as you only need a digital camera and internet access.
- It has an international market of enormous size, since the pictures speak all languages.
- It can be done in the city of your choice.
- It can be done in your free time.
- You can turn a passion into a business.
This is just a case of the businesses and companies that can be done on the Internet. There are many others and we need to think differently if we want to take advantage of this revolution. I hope you know how to start a business with no money on internet and enjoy the success.
