These days you’re not confined to only your daily job to make money. The internet is a portal to your economic freedom. The more work you are willing to put in the more money and financial freedom you can get. Cryptocurrency for me is definitely a key in this aspect, but there is also other options out there that can allow you to make money based on your knowledge and skill.
In university I studied to become an industrial designer. It’s not the title I have today, though I still use this knowledge. Having said that I still have made sure to moneterize that knowledge that I acquired by sharing my knowledge and work online. I do that through something called micro stocks.
In micro stocks you can sell royalty free images. So what is that exactly?
“In photography and the illustration industry, it refers to a copyright license where the user has the right to use the picture without many restrictions based on one-time payment to the licensor. The user can therefore use the image in several projects without having to purchase any additional licenses. RF licenses can not be given on an exclusive basis. In stock photography, RF is one of the common licenses sometimes contrasted with Rights Managed licenses and often employed in subscription-based or microstock photography business models.”
Through microstocks you can sell your photos or illustrations and or designs for a reasonable amount without the customer having to hire a third party. Microstocks is a huge data base of work made by contributors and the customer can search for something that firts their needs. Let’s say they need a woman with good skin. They can search for those keywords and find thousands of pictures from different contributors. In the end they can find something that fits their need and they do not need to hire a model, photographer or editor, and they don’t pay very much for the license.
Now the great thing about microstocks is that you can sell the same image an infinitive amount of times. I will share an example of my own work.
This is a simple 3D illustration of a shark fin. I know it’s a graphic that is quite popular and I made it as simple as possible because that would make it more versitile for the customer.
As you can see I made more than $142 for this one image and it has been downloaded 138 times. That’s not bad for one image right ? The great thing about it is that once you upload it you can just sit back and the money will drop in automatically as people buy it.
Now they insane thing about it that you can not only sell this image an infinitive times but you can upload it to as many different microstock websites as you want.
Here are some other examples where I used the same design but with different rendering effects
Once I make one 3D model I can build on it and make different concepts.
With minor changes the images is changed drastically.
Most people sell photos on these microstocks sites. I, however chose to niche myself with 3D illustration. The fact is that today the microstock companies take a huge cut of the profit. The awesome thing is that there are new projects being launched that are using blockchain technology to cut out the third part. One such project is #photochain that I’m very excited about.
I think that the Steem blockchain would be perfect for making microstocks. Especially because we have so many contributors doing photography. Imagine the power of being able to allow your blog photos to be sent to a steem database and be sold royalty free. This would allow your photo to not only get you paid during the 7 day window on Steemit, but for as long as there is someone willing to buy it. The most awesome thing about this concept is that this market could allows other crypto currencies and fiat money to flow into Steem and drive up the value as they buy the photos created by the Steemit community ! What do you say isn’t that an awesome idea ?