Member-only story
Why I Pay For Free Photos
The Gift Economy is ready for you too
I love pexels.com. I love typing in any word and watching free photos pop up that might give my story on Medium or Vocal a way to attract readers. A good photo can elevate any essay. And they are free! Wow.
I love free stuff. Give me the samples. Give me the coupon. Give me the free table. I deserve it all.
However, since I joined pexels.com last month as a contributor I have decided to stop using images without paying at least a little something to the photographer. I don’t know why it took me over a year on Medium to make this decision, but now I can see what I was blind to earlier — that pexels.com can be part of the “gift economy” that I so love to promote. If I am going to talk the talk I need to walk the walk.
What is the Gift Economy?
When I co-taught a class called “Microeconomy” we used the school year to follow the development of money and exchange over the history of humans. We started the year out by asking our students to imagine what life was like for people before the invention of money. Money is a recent phenomenon. For 99% of the time that humans have been humans, we did not have money.
Our students assumed that instead of money, early humans used barter to exchange goods, but most researchers think…
