Notes to Self

We Appreciate Your Business

I saw a sign outside a corner market on Mission Street in San Francisco yesterday that said this, in plain text on a plain red background, and I thought, you know what?, I should clue my readers in on how this site supports itself and then thank them for shopping through it.

I was having coffee with a friend the other day and he was telling me how he got a $500 grant to shop for his high school art class and he went online and bought art books through amazon and art supplies through Dick Blick. I asked him if he thought of clicking through the ads on this site on his way and he said with crumpled brow, “No, should I?”

And I said, “Of course! How do you think I make a living? Or try to make a living? I get a very small commission from each sale that is made by one of my readers clicking through an advertisement and making a purchase. Or going to the regional amazon aStores that I have on each regional site and making their purchases through them.”

My friend, surprised, said, “You make a commission on top of the advertising fees you get for displaying the ads?”

Display advertising. That’s sort of how magazine advertising works. The companies pay a display advertisement fee for their ads to be included in the publication. Depending on the size of the ad it can be as little as $150 and go into the thousands as the ads go to full pages or a double page spread. That’s how the magazines make their income. That and subscription fees.

Web advertising doesn’t work that way, except on the very big sites. On small content sites like this one, our only income are the commissions we make on sales that are made by our readers clicking through a link and making a purchase. So if no one does that, we don’t earn a living.

And that’s how it’s been for us for ten years.

I told my friend that, “No, I don’t make fees for running ads. All of those companies set aside a small percentage from each sale to pay their affiliates like me. If you go directly to their site by typing in their address, no one gets a commission and the company gets to keep the percentage. So why not make your art and travel related purchases through the links here? The commissions are just sitting there, waiting for someone to earn them.”

My friend thought for a moment and then said, “I don’t think people in general know that. I never knew that!”

“If I was making advertising fees, I’d be able to pay my bills. I’d be able to support myself. I’d be able to pay writers to write for me, the site would get bigger, the stories would be better … Didn’t you ever ask yourself what’s wrong with this picture?”

He replied that he hadn’t. And I don’t think that most of my friends and family have gotten the clue card either, because this is the second time I’ve had this very same conversation in the last two months.

So, now I’m just putting it out there. If you are going to shop and purchase online anyway, use this site as your portal. Besides the amazon stores on each site, there are plenty of links through to travel and art ecommerce related sites. There are also two pages on this site that collate all of this information – yes please bookmark and use them!

artist-at-large.com Travel Resources

artist-at-large.com Gift Guide

And soon we’ll have our own line of eBooks. But I’ll write another post about that.

So, for now I want to say:

Thank you for shopping through us.
We appreciate your business.

:)

>компютри втора употребаI don’t think so.

Ever since I redesigned artist-at-large.com and started using the Futurosity theme for the regional sections of the site, I’ve been getting great comments about the site. I think the theme is just perfect for the way I envisioned the site to be – an online magazine that never goes out of date, where the readers can come to it and flip through the stories and find their way around the world.

It’s working so well for me, that a few people have written, asking that I send my files to them so they can use them on their own site. One guy in India assured me that he would be using it for a completely different topic! I told him how much I charged per hour for WordPress theme hacks and I haven’t heard back from him.

Yes, WordPress themes are free, but having someone hack them for you is not. It’s a lot of work. A lot of work, to get a theme to look just right for a particular project.

I found someone this morning who has copied some of my work from view page source (I think) and I’ve politely written and told him my photographs are under copyright and that he should take them off of his site immediately.

I think this is a good time to talk about what constitutes stealing on the internet or the web. If you take a photographer’s work without their permission, and post it on a public section of your own site, giving the impression that you took the photo, then you are setting yourself up for some trouble, or, if the photographer is ornery enough, a lawsuit. Always read the copyright in the footer and follow the link, if there is one, to get details of what that copyright includes. My copyrights include not reproducing or hotlinking to my work without permission and once permission is given credit as the photographer must be included. I also charge real money for the use of my photographs, so if you use them without permission, even via a hotlink, expect a hefty bill if they aren’t taken down in a timely manner.

If you want free photographs to illustrate your site, go to Flickr. It’s full of free photos and some of them are even good.