Instagram is a great place to share your photos. But conventional wisdom holds that it isn’t a great place to sell your photos. After all, why would somebody pay for something that they can see for free simply by going to your Instagram account.
Two photographers have done a lot to change that perception by making thousands of dollars in a single day by selling their prints online.
Almost a month ago, we brought you news that a photographer, Daniel Arnold, made $15,000 in one day on Instagram. The formerly-broke photographer had around $90 in his bank account and had no idea how he would pay his rent. Then, he got the idea of selling his prints on Instagram for “one day only” at $100 a piece and his followers (more than 22,000 of them) rewarded him with a payday of over $15,000.
But anything can happen once. Like proving something using the scientific method, the results had to be duplicated before people could take Instagram seriously as a viable marketplace for photographers.
Now, for a second time, a photographer has proven how profitable it can be. Aaron Huey is a photographer for the National Geographic, so he wasn’t in the same dire financial straits as Arnold was. But he nevertheless followed the same “one day only” model and $100 price point that Arnold pioneered and ended up making $10,000 in a single day.
The run on his site was so large that it actually caused it to crash, and Huey decided to extend the offer indefinitely.
Huey tells Forbes that while he heard of the Arnold story, he and his National Geographic photographer buddies have been talking about doing it for a while, he was just the first to take the plunge.
Advertisers are looking towards Instagram as their next fertile hunting ground, but perhaps, there is something deeper going on here. Is it possible that we are seeing the birth of a showcase for artists, not just advertisers?
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