Introduction
There are a lot of sites that give away stock images, vectors, and videos for free. Some may question the legitimacy of these sites. If you have wondered how companies can afford to give away content for free and why they do it, read on to find out.
Upselling Premium Subscriptions
Although not always the case, many of the sites that offer free content also offer paid for features. Freepik is a good example of this. The free features help attract customers, who can then be upsold to the premium features. Even if a site might not have a premium subscription currently, they might try to build up a large customer base before offering paid for features. Some premium paid sites have also started offering their own free libraries, highlighting the value of this approach.
Low-Cost Advertising
You might be a surprise by the number of micro-stock sites that are owned by a single company. Getty and Unsplash and iStock are all part of the same company, Getty Images. The free sites can act as a marketing platform for the companies with more premium offering.
Affiliate Income
Most of the large micro-stock sites offer affiliate programs which allow people to make money by referring people to their website. The links, which earn people a commission when they refer others to other sites, are known as affiliate links. When sales are made by someone who followed one of these affiliate links, the referrer gets a percentage of the sales. Typically, in the region of 20% to 25%. This makes it potentially very lucrative to provide links to other micro-stock companies. Several companies and individuals have set up free stock sites to offer free photos and only earn income through these affiliate links.
Links to Other Sites
A big part of online marketing is making sure websites rank highly on search engines such as Google. This is known as search engine optimisation (SEO). The more links that point to a website, the better. This link building process is a large part of SEO. Sites that offer free photos typically help to build these backlinks through two different approaches.
- Attribution links: Many sites like Freepik require you to provide a credit line if you use their free content. This can quickly result in lots of different websites providing links to the source company.
- Linking partner sites: As mentioned before, a single company can own multiple micro-stock companies. Each of these sites can provide backlinks to the other sites under the same company.
Data Gathering
Big data is a big thing. If a platform has a lot of customers, this will lead to a lot of data that can be helpful either directly for that website or for another part of the business. Large datasets are vital for the growth of AI, so these sites can serve as a useful source of information.
