After long consideration and lots of going back and forth, I've decided to end my Pixabay Curation Magazine series. While this initiative has received many positive praises from my followers, it has been too difficult to successfully curate public domain images on Pixabay.
A lot of artists simply didn't accept Paypal donations and some images hosted on Pixabay belonged to other hosts of public domain images, thus donations wouldn't actually go to individual artists in those cases.
Aside from that, I just didn't have any motivation left for writing additional issues of Pixabay Curation Magazine. I'm still very passionate about supporting artists who publish their work under permissive licenses, but there are far better ways to support them. A better way would be to support artists directly on Steemit and I will be looking into creating a different initiative for that.
Issues with Pixabay Curation Magazine
- Difficult to convert Steem to Paypal. The fees are very high, so artists received less.
- It's outside of Steemit, it would make more sense to start something similar on the Steem blockchain.
- High amounts of copied works on Pixabay, while they're also public domain, the donation would not go directly to the artist.
- Writing each issue was very labor-intensive, while the impact was rather small.
Pixabay Curation Magazine Achievements
Since publishing the first issue of Pixabay Curation Magazine, we've been able to donate $ 50.00 to artists on Pixabay. In total we've supported 15 artists with a small donation through this initiative. Part of it was paid through the upvotes I had received on my publications and the rest was added by myself.
I'm glad that we were able to show some appreciation to the people who choose share their talent selflessly. For that I owe you all a BIG thanks!
Ideas for a Steem-Based Initiative
This announcement doesn't mean that it's over though! Ideally I would like to start something similar to Utopian, so that artists who release their work into the public domain can receive funding in the form of upvotes. Utopian already has graphics category, but it's currently limited to contributors of open-source projects.
I would like to support anyone who creates high-quality photographs, illustrations, vector images, etc. - and releases them into the public domain or at minimum a very permissive Creative Commons license, such as CC-BY-SA.
Forking Utopian could possibly be an option or even starting a new project from scratch would be within the realm of possibilities. I'm also not opposed to working together with existing projects such as Utopian itself, but I expect that I currently do not have the required experience to do so.
I'm definitely interested in hearing ideas from the Steemit community. So if you know someone at Utopian or people involved in the copyleft community, please share this idea!
Payout Spreadsheet | Introduction Post | Response from a Featured Artist
Pixabay Curation Magazine // Issue 1
Pixabay Curation Magazine // Issue 2
Pixabay Curation Magazine // Issue 3
Pixabay Curation Magazine // Issue 4
Pixabay Curation Magazine // Issue 5
Pixabay Curation Magazine // Issue 6