{"id":528589,"date":"2010-04-15T03:22:00","date_gmt":"2010-04-15T07:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techdirt.com\/articles\/20100414\/1726459016.shtml"},"modified":"2010-04-15T03:22:00","modified_gmt":"2010-04-15T07:22:00","slug":"photographer-makes-one-third-of-his-living-expenses-off-only-94-fans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/528589","title":{"rendered":"Photographer Makes One-Third Of His Living Expenses Off Only 94 Fans"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jim Hein<\/b> writes “a very well known Fine Art photographer is using the CwF+RtB model<\/a>. He breaks things down into actual dollars and cents. He has figured out how many “True Fans” he needs to make a living.”<\/i><\/p>\n

Photographer Ctein’s “Contributor Program<\/a>” gives his fans the opportunity to collect his prints and allow him to focus on creating. He shared the latest results:<\/p>\n


\nMake no mistake, I didn’t get anywhere close to 1000 True Fans (didn’t expect to), I got 94. But those Contributors provided me with approximately $15,500 gross revenues, $12,500 net. That’s about one third of what I need to live on, not a life-altering level of support but certainly a life-enhancing one that provides me with considerably more time to work on my art — the point of this.
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Even though the tiers start at only $9.50 a month, his average sale was around $165 — demonstrating that he has given his customers a real reason to buy. Additionally, Ctein recognizes that his subscribers are his most passionate fans, so he takes this as an opportunity to further solidify his connection to them:<\/p>\n


\nLast winter I offered them about a dozen extra dye transfer prints from the first TOP print sale at an extraordinarily low price, and super-cheap copies of my photo restoration book before the new edition came out. They also got advance notice of this year’s print sale.
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Offering exclusives is one of the ten scarcities<\/a> that we’ve discussed before, so it’s great to see it in practice. The other lesson that Ctein learned from his experiment is that, yes, it does take work. He now has to devote about 3 days a month dealing with the administration of his subscriber program. That said, spending 3 days a month on something that provides 1\/3 of your living expenses seems like a worthwhile investment. And this is only in the first few months of launching his program — if he’s able to improve the performance, he could do much better. So yes, it’s exciting to see photographers embracing the CwF+RtB concepts and making them work.<\/p>\n

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Jim Hein writes “a very well known Fine Art photographer is using the CwF+RtB model. He breaks things down into actual dollars and cents. He has figured out how many “True Fans” he needs to make a living.” Photographer Ctein’s “Contributor Program” gives his fans the opportunity to collect his prints and allow him to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-528589","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=528589"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528589\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=528589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=528589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=528589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}