Stock Photo Site Used by Millions Has Authority, Missing Revenue: Thoughts for 2021 Growth & Monetization?
In 2021, I'm reviving work on an idle side project and I'd love your input on monetization and growth. 🚀
Site: StartupStockPhotos.com
Stats: ~20-40k/mo visits, mostly direct/referral (declined from 70k+/mo)
SEO value: 76 DA, 100k backlinks
Tech: Sanity.io CMS
Audience: Writers, entrepreneurs, marketers, and designers around the world.
Goals: Generate predictable revenues by EOY, then explore bigger opportunities after. (Seems doable!)
Challenge: Photos are ours but we gave them away CC0 and can't be re-sold. All of the big stock photo aggregators syndicate these photos already and get more traffic. UX is designed to be minimalist. Therefore, I'm unclear what to test and where to expand.
Opportunity: Building long-form SEO blog/content pages and driving affiliate offers. Considering the domain authority, I think they'd have a good chance at ranking new pages. Also, capturing emails and sending offers to the list.
👀 Seeking Advice: If you had access to this domain, what direction would you take? What type of affiliate offers or content pages would you explore? 🤔
Extra Context/Background:
Startup Stock Photos began as our agency's side project, just for fun. We progressively added our own photos to startupstockphotos.com in 2014-2016, set all photos to CC0, and let it sit for years. All of the photos on the site, and our others on Pexels/Pixabay etc, were shot by us/our friends and feature our friends/coworkers.
Our photos have been viewed billions of times (600+ million just on Pexels), and downloaded tens of millions of times that we can track (likely 100s of millions). While credit was not required, we've acquired links from a small fraction of the sites that use it, from brands like HubSpot and Canva, to publishers like Fast Company and Mashable.
I plan to share feedback on new monetization and growth activities as we go.
TIA for your feedback.
Lazy monetization: ads or affiliate programs won't earn you much with 30K/ mo visitors.
If you want to earn money, I recommend making a product for sale. Probably as simple as premium photo packs, but I wouldn't deviate too far from what you know your audience is seeking.
P.s. my experience is based off offering free background graphics and selling access to a larger collection for money. ($500mrr with 15K/mo visitors)
Great point. To start, we can package up our existing photos as a bundle and add in a few extras that aren't up there. That's a fairly easy experiment to see if the audience is interested in an upsell of convenience (all on my desktop versus rummaging 1-by-1).
Re: Affiliate - the thought was to build out separate, one-off/child content pages that could generate 100s/1000s of visits on their own and refer out to other offers or products. Less so trying to monetize the homepage (which is the bulk of traffic). Seems unlikely?
Just curious, by my count you have 110 photos on the site. Is that all you ever had with those numbers?
Yep. Small # of quality photos that people come back for again and again. Sourcing new ones is more difficult than it used to be (when the contributors worked at the agency) but it seems like a must, eh?
That’s really amazing you get those traffic numbers with such a small amount of content. I think that speaks to the quality of the photos and/or you’re hitting a niche you might not even realize. Do you know where you’re ranking for on SERP? Might be a way to double down on that category in some way.