THANK YOU FOR THE PHOTOGRAPHY DONATION!
My portfolio of Flickr photos has been licensed under Creative Commons Attirbution Only since 2007. This means that anybody can use my pics as long as they give me a credit link in return. Many companies have done this over the years, including such well-known companies as FastCompany, Smashing Magazine, South African Tourism & Cape Town Tourism. There may be many bigger companies I dont even know about as for many years the only notifications I got were from Google Alerts. About a year ago I subscribed to a free service – Mention.net – and they’ve proved to be “Google Alerts on steroids”.
Since then I regularly get alerts of people using my photos and the other day I got a notification that the massively popular (and recommended) blog LifeHacker used one of my pics. This got me to thinking… Photography equipment is super expensive and I really dont want to start changing my photo licensing. With the takeoff of Kickstarter, Indiegogo etc I thought to myself – let me start a “micro-sponsorship” program, which I duly did.
As luck would have it, within a week I got a mention notification that TheJigsawPuzzles.com had used some of my pics. So I went to their site and dropped them a comment asking them to consider a small donation…
…HEY PRESTO: Paypal confirmed their donation today 🙂 Thanks Guys! Gonna put it toward a 72mm Variable ND Filter for my Canon.