eyeem

Replacing Instagram with Eyeem and a blog makes sense. When Instagram was new, before it was bought by Facebook it was a network of people who liked to take pictures sharing with friends and family. As it grew and as more people used it people followed less discerningly and so it became more of a popularity contest than a photo-sharing website.

Today Instagram shows an advert every four images and whilst this may not sound like much it is. This means that as you skim through the timeline you see an advert almost all the time. In some cases, you see the same advert a few times in a single session. For now, you can block advertiser accounts not to see their adverts again but this takes time.

Simultaneously you think “If I wanted to see adverts I’d browse a magazine or I’d visit other websites.” You also think “Why am I putting up with these adverts and “Why am I providing Facebook with people’s attention from content that I generated?”

That’s where websites like Eyeem make sense. Such websites allow you to share your pictures to a community of photographers. It also allows you to attempt to monetise your images. For now, 55 of my images have been accepted into the market program and 33 are in the partner program. With persistence and time, people may show interest in these images.

I also have a photo-sharing blog because I want a place to share pictures for which I do not have enough inspiration to write a blog post and they are not good enough to share on Eyeem. I like the idea of having a blog where a picture a day is posted. I’ve posted over four thousand to Instagram and it takes about 3 gigabytes. Wordpress allows us to share content via a decentralised content management system.

With Wordpress or other platforms, we can use their services for free until we establish a big enough audience for it to be worthwhile to monetise our content eventually.