Unsplash

Unsplash had massive traffic but only ~$4-5M revenue

Sam reveals free stock-photo site Unsplash was doing only ~$4-5M/year despite hundreds of millions of image downloads, and argues a 'proper' operator could crush it by charging upfront. His takeaway: free is fine for growth, but capture value aggressively once you have the usage.

“They were only doing around 4-ish million, $4 or $5 million a year in revenue, even though like hundreds of millions of their images were being downloaded. Right. And I was actually shocked at how small they were. If I had that much traction, A, I would have been far more aggressive about selling ads on the site and B, far more aggressive about getting subscriptions and charging a lot of money for them.”

Steal thisIf a free product has huge usage but tiny revenue, monetize aggressively with ads or paid subscriptions.