Keeping up with current events

I’m a big proponent of watching for what is in the news and trying to think of what the next big story will be. I use Flipboard for this and I like the way the site comes up with the general stories, but also illustrates them with images that may trigger my creative juices! I curate a stock photography oriented magazine with Alex Rotenberg if you are interested in that. I thought it might be interesting to see how my recent attempts at being ahead of the news have turned out.

First, a failure…. I knew that the Game of Thrones would be of massive interest once the new season was announced, so what better than to add some images that people could use to illustrate their articles about the HBO show. A friend on mine has had success with images and videos of the dragon eggs and iron throne and she asked me to buy the newly released tankards and ship them to her in Australia and was happy to have them photographed first:

I obviously knew these were going to be editorial so I thought that adding in the books themselves and some medieval lighting might be interesting. I also took straight forward isolated shots as well as 4K videos:

The show has been announced now, but so far total earnings have been $1.83. FAILURE…

However, never being one to give up, I’ve just uploaded them to Fine Art America and added a page on both this site and also BackyardStockPhotos.com to show off these new prints. I’m hoping that either someone might want a print for their TV room or perhaps one of these items printed on a mug? Who knows!

So with one failure under my belt, what was next? I decided to invest $11.87 in a roll of I Voted Today stickers from Amazon just before the US midterm elections. Now this one was better. The most popular image was this:

but altogether the series of photos and videos earned $62 and can also be used for non-US elections as well. Hopefully a good source of income for the future.

Successes: 1 Failures: 1

Obviously my bitcoin and opioid shots continue to earn, although not as well as they once did. I think that with the RF license, big users probably license the images they like and then they use them as necessary in the next story that comes along. I notice this a lot with Motley Fool – one of my social security shots keeps being used to illustrate stories about that.

Immigration next. I thought this would become a big topic and so did images on both the Dreamers and also citizenship. The latter was quite simple:

Pretty simple concept – earned $44 so far with no outlay. So a qualified success.

The dreamers ones were less successful. This was the best seller:

The total for this concept $23… I don’t know if this counts as a poll, but no-one has bought the version with the X in the No box!

So the bottom line is – keep thinking of what you can create. Spend a bit of money to make it happen and hopefully reap the rewards in the years to come! I’ll let you know if there are any Game of Thrones fans that would really like a metal print on their wall!