As many of you know, Clickasnap is a platform that allows photographers to make money just from views. Effectively bringing photography into the 21st century alongside music monetization via Spotify and video monetization via Youtube. But what determines the value of a view on your photo?

Your images are monetized by advertising, but advertising is not an infinite pool of cash unfortunately. Each user that visits the platform, will on average have 7 companies bidding to reach that user whilst they’re on the platform. Now, each user views on average 15 pages, with 3 ads per page means that after page 3 there is either zero or low bids. Thus, users viewing more images in a single session actually means lower revenue as any pages after page 3 have a zero revenue but still have a distribution cost, thus subtracting from the overall payment per view. This is why our work on bringing in organic traffic this year is very important. Many companies have tried to emulate our business model and every single one has failed. Primarily for 2 reasons:

1. Outside (or organic) traffic was ignored thus leading to click circles. This in turn reduced the user base and with it the revenue. This of course led to business failure

2) The inability to scale. Ad revenue for small platforms is tiny therefore most companies cannot afford to scale without large and ongoing investment until they reach a large enough critical mass to command direct ad sales. Which is where the money is for ad funded websites

Both of these we have successfully navigated. A couple of other factors make us stand out to advertisers: The bulk of our traffic is from the US and the UK, furthermore, because we restrict free useage of the platform to 7 uploads per day the bulk of the content uploaded is of a high quality that advertisers would like their businesses seen against. We did, in our early days, have no restriction on uploads, but the platform rapidly got inundated with thousands of uttery terrible images. This is of course typical of such a methodology because people go for sheer volume of quality. This of course is incredibly detrimental to the long term future of the platform, as google and other search engines won’t index it, no one outside of a few platform users view it and of course revenue falls through the floor.

What does all this mean for you? If the high level of content is maintained, accurate descriptions are added to the photos (ads are often targeted to keywords on the page, no description, no keywords, no ads, no revenue) and we continue to invest our income from the paid accounts into the platform 2 things will happen:

1. More organic traffic, more views, more cash for our users
2. More users, more advertisers competing for ad space means higher revenue therefore higher payments per view

To close, thankyou to all of our users, particularly those of you who contribute through one of the paid tiers. Here’s to a fantastic 2020 and lots more sales and payments for our 22,000 users

Tom Oswald

CEO