Is there a website that charges for gallery access?

Galleries are my bread and butter, but at the moment, I am not making any money by showing them for free. Is there a website that can present my galleries in a locked form and have customers pay for access into them? I'm thinking either a password protected (possibly a password generator), or a one-time cookie of some sort. This would help me out a lot if there is a way.

I can't help you with an answer, but I am curious about what you're intending. Is your plan to charge people to view your work online? Is this service photography (ie photos of your customers; portraits, weddings etc) or are you hoping to charge people to look at landscapes / fine art / sports / etc?

That's a pretty bold request. Site unseen charge a fee so that you can then just view your images? I just don't see that working out.

I'm not sure I understand either, who would pay to see your images? Maybe I'm missing something here.

But you can even just use flikr for this, make the gallery private and hidden, then you can send out what they call a guest pass to those that get to view the images. I do that with photos I take at school, link only goes to parents and they can forward to friends/relatives if they want, but the kids photos are otherwise invisible to the net.

On smugmug you can also set passwords for galleries and just not list them on your page

RMH wrote in post #17340208
I can't help you with an answer, but I am curious about what you're intending. Is your plan to charge people to view your work online? Is this service photography (ie photos of your customers; portraits, weddings etc) or are you hoping to charge people to look at landscapes / fine art / sports / etc?

Yes, my plan is to charge people to view my work online. These are sports galleries. Pro-wrestling, to be specific. I want to charge something like $1 so that they can view the album, and trust me, they WANT to view the album.

Chet wrote in post #17340215
That's a pretty bold request. Site unseen charge a fee so that you can then just view your images? I just don't see that working out.

It's going to work out, without a doubt.

phantelope wrote in post #17340224
I'm not sure I understand either, who would pay to see your images? Maybe I'm missing something here.

But you can even just use flikr for this, make the gallery private and hidden, then you can send out what they call a guest pass to those that get to view the images. I do that with photos I take at school, link only goes to parents and they can forward to friends/relatives if they want, but the kids photos are otherwise invisible to the net.

On smugmug you can also set passwords for galleries and just not list them on your page

There are people who anxiously wait to see my pictures. And I feel like I'm missing out on a boatload of opportunities for a payout. Imagine thousands of people wanting to see your work, waiting in line and checking to see what they want is in stock, and it's something they always want to see.

I look to only charge $1 to view each gallery - then everyone would be able to afford it, and I would possibly be able generate over a thousand dollars for each set of photos.

There is a huge difference between people wanting to view free stuff vs those people actually willing to pay for what was previously free. I would suggest googling phrases like "free to paid conversion rates" and reading up on it. Based on most of the research done into this you will be lucky to get 1-2% of your current free viewers to pay. Next is the issue that payment processing fees are quite large, making it unrealistic to charge small amounts like $1. You would look a big chunk of that in fees.

Most of the sports/event shooters who work professionally agree that the only way to get paid (a worthwhile amount) is to be paid by the organisers (who then use the images to promote their events). So get paid to shoot and give the pics away for free.

As for answering your actual question I don't know of any sites/systems that do it but if you google "website pay wall service" or words to that affect you may be able to find someone who can provide what you are looking for.

CH_Devin wrote in post #17340272
There are people who anxiously wait to see my pictures. And I feel like I'm missing out on a boatload of opportunities for a payout. Imagine thousands of people wanting to see your work, waiting in line and checking to see what they want is in stock, and it's something they always want to see.

I look to only charge $1 to view each gallery - then everyone would be able to afford it, and I would possibly be able generate over a thousand dollars for each set of photos.

Let's say you do the $1 transcation and you use PayPal to accept payments. From memory Paypal will take $.30 as a transaction fee + 2.5% on top of that as their normal fee.

So 1000 people pay $1 equals $1000.

PayPal will take $.30 per transaction + 2.5% so you are now at $1 per transaction - the $.325 Paypal will take.

So your $1000 is now - $325 in fees. So if you are correct you are losing $325 in fees for every $1000 in transactions.

Only you will know if its worth it or not.

Check out the features that these guys provide. It might be your best option short of coding your own site;

https://www.exposurema​nager.com/

You may find what they do offer for sports galleries to be good solution.

the flying moose wrote in post #17340765
Let's say you do the $1 transcation and you use PayPal to accept payments. From memory Paypal will take $.30 as a transaction fee + 2.5% on top of that as their normal fee.

So 1000 people pay $1 equals $1000.

PayPal will take $.30 per transaction + 2.5% so you are now at $1 per transaction - the $.325 Paypal will take.

So your $1000 is now - $325 in fees. So if you are correct you are losing $325 in fees for every $1000 in transactions.

Only you will know if its worth it or not.

Using PayPal Micropayments would reduce the fees to $100 (5% + $.05).

But still, I really want to read my local newspaper, but when they started charging, I found my news elsewhere.

Even Peter Lik doesn't charge to view his galleries...

My cousin is a rabid Pro Wrestling fan. I do not doubt the poster about them wanting to pay to see his images. That fan base pays for a lot of things and this wouldnt surprise me one bit. If you can generate some money from it as well as sell prints then why not? More people will be quick to say no than to say give it a shot.

An out of the box idea -- if your customer base is that eager for your work, you might try a subscription style service like Patreon.

Dan Marchant wrote in post #17340747
There is a huge difference between people wanting to view free stuff vs those people actually willing to pay for what was previously free. I would suggest googling phrases like "free to paid conversion rates" and reading up on it. Based on most of the research done into this you will be lucky to get 1-2% of your current free viewers to pay. Next is the issue that payment processing fees are quite large, making it unrealistic to charge small amounts like $1. You would look a big chunk of that in fees.

Most of the sports/event shooters who work professionally agree that the only way to get paid (a worthwhile amount) is to be paid by the organisers (who then use the images to promote their events). So get paid to shoot and give the pics away for free.

As for answering your actual question I don't know of any sites/systems that do it but if you google "website pay wall service" or words to that affect you may be able to find someone who can provide what you are looking for.

I agree with you about conversion rates and $1 fee minus per transaction charge & transaction % being taken out. You are looking at around 60 cents on a dollar with just credit card payment fees.

What you want to open up is a membership website (ie. porn site just without porn and wrestling pictures instead). Credit card companies do not trust membership websites as much as other types of businesses and therefore charge higher %. Membership websites also tend to have a higher percentage of chargebacks. There are many options for existing membership website software that can be purchased and installed on your website. You would need to have a merchant account that the software can support to accept payments and within the software you can create membership types and put restrictions on your content.

Membership websites make money on volume and mostly from recurring payments. As Dan mentioned typically they convert at 1-2%. That means for every 1000 visitors you will get 10-20 sales. Lets assume that because of your super content that is highly in demand you will get 10% conversion (100 sales per 1000 visitors). 100 people make a payment on your website and you get $60. There is also additional expenses that you have to pay for in advance and will reduce the $60 of profit even further. There is ongoing cost of web hosting, cost of web design, cost to advertise, cost of membership website software, domain registration, company formation fees, taxes, professional fees, etc. Lets hypothetically say this additional cost over 10 years will be $10,000. If you allocate 10 cents of each transaction to repayment of this amount you would need 100,000 sales over 10 years to be making full 60 cents on the dollar. For first 10 years you would be earning 50 cents on a dollar.

So using my inflated conversion rate of 10% (5-10x normal) and earning 50 cents per transaction and from 1000 visitors you will earn $50. If you have 10,000 visitors you will earn $500. Maybe you take pictures of female mud wrestling and can get 10,000 people but for regular wrestling you will not get that much interest in the day when information can be obtained for free online. You should also ask yourself why would people pay to view pictures of wrestling instead of videos?