Patrick and I created Fstoppers.com about eight years ago and it's been a wild ride. We never planned any of this, we simply tried to steer this ship that seemed to be moving on its own.
Fstoppers' entire existence has been a bit of an experiment for us. We usually come up with some sort of idea; whether it be a blog post, a video, or a full-length photography tutorial. We create it, we share it, and then we examine your response. It's pretty clear which of our projects are successful and which are duds based on clicks, views, and comments alone. And they don't even have to be positive comments. Sometimes the easiest way to gauge success is by counting negative comments (so we even appreciate the trolls).
In 2017 Patrick and I created more free and paid content than ever before, but it still felt like we were neglecting our website and our YouTube channel because we could have posted more. We've hired an incredible team of photographers/writers from around the world who bring you guys quality content every single day and it's been easy to post less knowing that the site has been in such good hands. Our hope for 2018 is to be more involved.
In a perfect world, all of our content would be free and we would get so much traffic that we could make enough money with advertising alone. Sadly this isn't the case. Fstoppers.com the website doesn't make much money after expenses and YouTube may only pay us a few hundred dollars for a video that took a team of us a week to produce.
The full-length photography tutorials in the Fstoppers Store are the only reason Fstoppers is what it is today. For those of you who have purchased one from us, thank you. You guys have made Fstoppers a success and have allowed us to create so much other free content. That being said, I would love to produce even more free content but to make this financially viable, we need more traffic to these posts and videos.
30 Videos in 30 Days
Starting tomorrow, January 1, 2018, we are going to release a new video and post on Fstoppers.com every single day for 30 days straight. We want to know what will happen if we work our asses off to bring you entertaining and informative free content every day for a month. Will Fstoppers.com gain exponentially more traffic? Will our YouTube channel gain exponentially more subscribers? Will anyone even notice?
As always, this is just another experiment for us. I'm not sure what's going to happen but, even if it's not a massive success, we're going to have a great time trying to pull it off and we hope you join us. This should be fun.
'grats for what you accomplished!
However, while there are more and more people looking mostly at videos, I must underline that I (and dunno how many others) am part of the ones who don't.
I really hope there will be articles (or at least transcripts) for the clips that bring new ideas to the table.
Hard work won't go unnoticed. Looking forward to the content chaps!
Big fan of the sites original content. I actively hunt that out.
The only negative I have when visiting here is when I'm tricked into clicking on an article I believe to be factual & it turns out to be "satire".
Can that be labelled up correctly in the title to stop readers feeling cheated?
Rant over, keep up the good work Lee & Patrick.
Peter
Ya we definitely don't want to clickbait people into reading the joke posts. Our goal is to make the titles obviously satire so that you know what it is before clicking.
Thanks for your reply, I only have limited time here so I'd much rather make use of it on the real articles & videos.
Looking forward to the videos
Peter
Lee, you guy's put out a great product!! Both website and training videos!! The internet mentality however is everything should be free. Which for most is a load of doggy doo. Freebies always have caveats behind them allowing them to succeed. Despite what people may feel you actually deserve to make a living.
I tend to doubt your new "experiment" will bring you where you want to be. Time will tell. The probable solution? Make your site subscription based. Of course, you'll lose many folks. But the goal at the end of the day is to be profitable.
Long story short? You put out a lot of quality content. You aggregate a lot of quality content. Charging for it is probably the only thing that will work. If you're not making a reasonable living after 8 years perhaps it's time to move away from the give it away for free model and move to subscription based. Those that value what you do will stay with you. As for the others let them go and start fresh building on subscriptions.
Thank you for the great tutorials that you guys have created. I have really enjoyed all the PTW seasons. I want to ask if you guys are going to make any new YouTube videos with Critique the Community? I have really enjoyed watching them and is hoping this is something you guys will do again?
Keep up the great work! Really enjoy your Youtube feed and articles.
Posting everyday! It worked for Casey and pulls in more $$ than when he posted once a week. If it's good content, the subscribers will come and the views will go up.
Call me the odd data point here but I don't like videos at all. I prefer to read my content. Most videos are just 15 minutes of gab-gab-gab when it can all be summarized in 30 seconds. I'd rather use the 14 minutes and 30 seconds saved to practice what I read in the tutorial.
I've been so disappointed when I see a headline for a topic I want to read only to find out it's a video.
Otherwise, I love fstoppers! The articles that do get posted are great reads!