Excuse me for the usage of such a clickbait title (again). The photography world is a declining market, which is why some big photography related websites already went out of business. Others are so loaded with advertising these days, it is barely possible to spot the actual content anymore. Some also opted for membership programs like Patreon. We on the other hand always financed this blog exclusively through unobtrusive affiliate links. This is only possible because it is a passion project by people with actual jobs that just happen to love photography.

I still have no intention to add annoying adverts or introducing a membership/Patreon/Onlyfans system, as I have always been an advocate of free internet and freely accessible information. I also don’t want to push junk software with high margins that I would never want to use myself or offer questionably useful presets.

This means I have to push this article 1-2 times per year – similar to what Wikipedia is doing every now and then – to reach more people.

There are many articles here that generate zero income: for example the Analogue Adventures and everything from the Technical Knowledge category, as these are not really about a product that could be bought by you. Same is also true for the reviews of simply bad lenses. Why would you buy them through affiliate links if we just told you they suck?

Affiliate links also don’t work for everyone and every item. If you are not from Canada or the US, B&H is surely less attractive. Many people from Europe don’t like ordering directly from Asia because of import duties and some items may also not be available through our affiliate partners at all.

Thinking of reviews of affordable vintage lenses: if you buy a lens for $50 on eBay, we only get a $1 commission for that. So in these cases, you would do us a bigger favour by donating $5 and buying that lens at a lower price locally (if possible), than using the affiliate links.

If you find yourself in one of these categories – or if you simply want to support us without using affiliate links – you can do that by using this Paypal donate button under our articles:

via Paypal (BastianK)
via Paypal (Martin)

The money you donate will go directly to the author of that article. Even though the blog had two million visitors last year according to our statistics, only around 100 decided to make a donation, so you can make a real difference here.

And if you often find yourself ordering from one of our affiliates: why not use any of our Amazon or eBay links as starting point for your purchases? It won’t cost you anything extra and helps us a lot. It doesn’t matter what you order, whether it is photography related or not, as long as you clicked on one of the links first.

PS: In my case any money would be used to track down and review further exotic lenses that you cannot find really useful information on elsewhere (like e.g. the Zeiss Hologon 16mm 8.0 or the Olympus OM 180mm 2.0).