My Photographs Are a Revenue Stream — For Nextdoor

I have been posting photographs to Nextdoor for about eight years. Roughly one a week — my best work, given away to my neighbors, free.

Here is how that has gone lately:

• A photograph of the sky, with a video — 46,000 views
• A wood duck — 33,000 views and 1,040 likes
• Another sky photograph — 24,000 views
• My quieter posts — 8,000 to 15,000 views each

I am frequently the most-read post in the southeast Portland feeds. That is not a boast about being famous; it is a small radius. But within it, a lot of people know my name and stop scrolling when they see it.

Recently I noticed something in the first comment on those posts. An advertisement for a national fast-food chain.

I did not put it there. I was not asked. I cannot remove it, and I cannot decline the next one.

That one is a sweepstakes from a retirement organization — perfectly harmless, and not the advertisement that set me off. Here is a different post of mine, from two weeks earlier.

Different photograph. Different week. Different company. Same slot.

And that is the whole point, which is why I am showing you two rather than one. If this were a single unfortunate advertisement I would have nothing to write about. The advertiser rotates. The slot does not. What is being sold is not a spot next to a picture of an owl — it is a spot next to whatever I make next, sight unseen, to whoever is buying that week.

I checked the others. Every one of my popular posts has a sponsored advertisement in the first comment position. Not occasionally — consistently, on the posts that perform best. The slot directly beneath the photograph, the one a reader’s eye goes to next, is inventory.

Here is the distinction I think matters. The particular advertiser may well be chosen for whoever happens to be reading — that is how targeted advertising works, and I cannot see other people’s screens. But the slot is not personalized. The slot is sold on every strong post, to whoever is buying.

Which means I have no idea what is currently attached to my photographs in other people’s feeds. It could be a nursery. It could be a fast-food chain. It could be something considerably worse. I have no say and no visibility, and neither do you when you post something that does well.

Let Me Do the Arithmetic Out Loud

Those three posts add up to 103,000 views. Assume the sponsored comment reaches around 80 percent of viewers, and that is roughly 82,000 advertising impressions.

Advertising is sold per thousand impressions — the industry calls it CPM. Nextdoor’s rates run toward the higher end for social platforms, because every account is tied to a verified address and the local targeting is unusually precise. Public figures generally land somewhere between $10 and $30 per thousand.

So, on those three photographs:

• At $10 per thousand — about $820
• At $15 — about $1,230
• At $30 — about $2,460

Call it somewhere around twelve hundred dollars of advertising, sold against three of my photographs.

Extend that across a year of weekly posting and you are looking at something in the range of $8,000 to $23,000 annually. Across eight years, considerably more — though the early years count for less, since Nextdoor barely sold advertising back then.

I want to be careful here: these are estimates built from public CPM ranges, not Nextdoor’s actual rate card. I do not have their numbers and neither does anyone outside the company. The arithmetic is above so you can check it and adjust it yourself.

My share of it, across eight years, is zero.

What I Am Not Claiming

Let me clear the ground, because I would rather be accurate than dramatic.

Nothing was stolen. I own every photograph and every copyright. Nextdoor did not put my wood duck in an advertisement — they put an advertisement beside it. And I agreed to terms permitting this, the way everyone does, by using a free service.

This was not aimed at me. It is automated. Advertising flows to wherever engagement is highest, my posts do well, so they get ads. Nobody at that company knows who I am.

And I got something in return. This is the part I want to be emphatic about, because it is easy to skip past on the way to a complaint.

Nextdoor has extended my reach further than every other social platform I use, combined. Not marginally — by an order of magnitude.

My best-performing video on TikTok has around 1,200 plays, and I was pleased with it. A quiet Nextdoor post does eight to ten times that number in an afternoon. Facebook and Instagram have never come close. Across eight years the total is well over a million views, and every one of them is somebody who lives near me — not an anonymous global audience, but the actual people who walk the same trails and look at the same sky.

They built something that works, and they gave it to me for nothing. There is a real chance more people have seen my photographs on Nextdoor than have seen them anywhere else in my life, including every gallery, gig, magazine and television appearance put together. I am not going to pretend that is a small thing, and I am not going to pretend I could have built it myself.

So this is not a call to leave, or to boycott anything, and I am not going anywhere. It is one specific objection to one specific practice, from somebody who has been served well by the rest of it.

So this is not a story about theft, or about a company with a grudge. It is about the arrangement, which is worth examining precisely because it is completely normal.

Ads With My Content

Here is the distinction that matters, and the order of the words is the whole point.

Nextdoor did not simply sell advertising. They sold advertising against my content. Without the wood duck, without the sky, without the owl, that placement has nothing to sit beside and nothing to interrupt. The impression exists only because somebody stopped scrolling — and they stopped for a photograph I got up early to take.

The platform does not photograph anything. It does not know anything about wood ducks. It owns the room and rents the walls.

That is not automatically wrong. A newspaper sells advertising next to a photographer’s work too, and nobody objects — because the newspaper commissioned the photograph and paid for it. The photographer was a supplier with a rate.

Some platforms kept part of that bargain. YouTube pays creators a share of the advertising revenue their work generates. Bandcamp gives musicians most of the sale price and the customer relationship along with it. Others pay something, patchily.

Nextdoor, as far as I can determine, has no creator program, no revenue share, and no mechanism by which a person who makes its content could be paid anything at all. The advertising model was kept. The supplier was removed.

I do not think that is theft. I think it is exploitation — taking disproportionate advantage of an imbalance of power — and I do not think being legal and disclosed settles whether it is right.

Which is the honest shape of this: it is an ethical question, not a legal one. I am not alleging a crime. Nothing here is against the rules, because the people who benefit wrote the rules and I clicked agree. I am asking a different question — whether a thing being permitted makes it right — and that question does not get settled by lawyers. It gets settled by what we decide is acceptable.

They Never Stopped. I Just Stopped Seeing Them.

This is the part where I have to correct myself, and it is the most important thing in this entire piece.

About a month ago I hid one of these advertisements and wrote to Nextdoor saying that if advertising was going to run on my posts, I wanted to be compensated. The advertisements went away. A few weeks later they were back. I hid them again, and again they went away.

I spent a while believing somebody there had listened to me. I was drafting a paragraph thanking them. Then, in the middle of writing this, they returned on my most recent posts, and I went looking for an explanation.

I found it in Nextdoor’s own help documentation, which explains the mechanics of hiding an advertisement. I am quoting it because it deserves to be read closely:

“When you hide or report an ad, it will be hidden for roughly 4 weeks. After that time period, there is a chance you will see that ad again.”

“Hiding applies only to the specific ad, and does not hide all ads from that advertiser.”

“You may briefly see the same ad after hiding it while we update your preferences.”

Four weeks. That is the interval I had been treating as a response to my complaint. It was a timer.

But look at the pronouns, because they are the whole story. You will see that ad again. Your preferences. Every sentence in that documentation describes what appears on my own screen.

Hiding an advertisement is a viewer setting. It does not remove the advertisement from my post. It removes the advertisement from my view of my post.

Which means the advertisements never stopped. For the entire month I believed I had achieved something, my neighbors were still seeing them, sitting under my photographs, exactly as before. Thirty thousand people at a time. The only person in Portland who could not see the advertising on my own work was me.

I want to be fair about the intent here, because I do not think this was designed to deceive anybody. A hide button is meant to help a reader tune their own feed, and for that purpose it is a perfectly reasonable feature. The problem is that when you are the author of the post, the same button does something almost cruel by accident: it quiets your objection without addressing it. It gives you the feeling of having fixed the thing while the thing continues.

And now read the rest of that documentation, which tells you exactly how much control exists. Hiding lasts about four weeks, then expires. It cannot be undone. It applies to one specific advertisement, not to the advertiser, and certainly not to advertising in general. There is no setting anywhere — not one — that says do not sell advertising against my photographs.

So the record is this. Three of my posts, checked directly:

My post	Engagement	Advertisement in first comment
Collie at sunset	880 reactions, 102 comments	Yes — a Portland social service
Morning mist, Sellwood Forest	941 reactions, 36 comments	Yes — a national retirement organization
Barred owl, with a joke on it	480 reactions, 36 comments	Yes — the same retirement organization

Three for three. Two different advertisers. And the one control I was offered turned out to be a blindfold.

I have to hand it to them, because credit is owed where it is earned: as a business design, this is close to perfect.

Look at everything it does not require. No commissioning budget. No contracts, no rate negotiations, no rights clearances. No editors deciding which photographs deserve promotion — the engagement numbers do that automatically, and frankly better than an editor would. No talent scouting, because the talent arrives voluntarily and asks for nothing. No quality control either, because I handle that myself: I would never post a mediocre photograph under my own name to my own neighbors, so the platform receives only my best work, pre-filtered, free. And when the person who made the work objects, there is a button that makes him feel attended to without changing anything at all.

Every costly part of publishing has been removed. The revenue was kept. That is not incompetence or accident — it is a very good idea, executed well, and I would be lying if I said I did not admire the engineering.

But a perfect strategy is not the same thing as a fair one, and the reason it runs so efficiently is exactly the problem. It is efficient because one party does all of the work and the other collects all of the money. Removing the artist’s share is not an innovation. It is arbitrage, and I am the spread.

The Part That Actually Bothers Me

It is not really the money.

It is that I do not get to choose what appears beside my work.

I am plant-based. I photograph wildlife and write about habitat. Industrial beef production is among the larger drivers of habitat loss on this planet. So a conservation photograph with a fast-food advertisement attached to it is not merely off-brand for me — it argues against the thing the photograph exists to say.

But here is the part that actually stings, and it is not about my feelings at all.

It makes it look like I am promoting fast food and a meat-based diet.

Look again at the screenshot above and notice how it is built. My name is at the top. My face is at the top. My photograph is in the middle. And the advertisement is inside the same card, below my picture, above the replies from my neighbors. There is nothing in that frame that tells a reader which parts I chose and which parts were sold.

Most people are scrolling. They are not performing a forensic reading of platform layout conventions. They see a photographer they recognize, a photograph they like, and a restaurant recommendation, in one continuous block, under one name. A reasonable person could conclude I put it there. Some of them will.

That is not hurt feelings. That is my name being used to recommend a product and a way of eating I would never recommend, to an audience that trusts me specifically because I have spent twelve years giving them something honest and asking for nothing. The trust is the entire asset. It is the only thing I actually own here, and it took over a decade to build.

Spend it on a burger chain without asking me, and no amount of revenue share would make that right.

And here is the part nobody in this arrangement seems to have thought through: it is a bad deal for the advertiser too. A company paid real money to appear beside my work, presumably hoping some of the goodwill would transfer. What they actually bought was a placement beneath a photographer who is now writing a public article objecting to them. That is not brand association. That is the opposite of the thing they paid for, and they have no more say in it than I do.

Two parties in this transaction got a worse outcome than they wanted. Only the party in the middle, who made nothing and risked nothing, was guaranteed to come out ahead. One preference setting would have prevented all of it.

I have never told anyone in this neighborhood what to eat. I do not preach about it and I am not starting now. But I have spent years photographing what habitat loss looks like, and industrial animal agriculture is one of the largest reasons that habitat is disappearing. Those two facts sit right next to each other in my work, and anyone who reads me closely can see it. Then a platform bolts an advertisement for the opposite onto the bottom of it, in my name, and undoes the quiet version of the argument I was actually making.

And understand why this happens: the system has no idea what my photographs are about. It is not malicious, it is indifferent. It matches advertisers to audiences, never to meaning. Which means it will sometimes attach an advertisement that argues directly against the work it is attached to, and nothing in the machinery is capable of noticing.

Mine is a mild case. Somewhere on a platform like this, the same indifference is putting a pesticide advertisement under somebody’s photograph of a dying bee colony, or a cigarette advertisement under a lung cancer survivor’s post about quitting. Nobody chose those either. Nobody had to.

I am not claiming my situation is that serious. I am pointing out that it is the same system, and that the only thing standing between a mild case and a cruel one is luck.

Publishing worked this out a century ago. Serious publications keep advertising away from content it would contradict, and give the people who make the work some say. Platforms dropped that, and nothing replaced it.

Why I Was There in the First Place

This is the part I keep returning to.

I was not posting to build an audience or sell anything. I was doing what I have done in this neighborhood for years: photographing the place and handing it back to the people who live here. Free. No paywall. The memes on this site are still free to download and share, and they always will be.

That generosity is exactly what made the content valuable. A platform can buy advertising. It cannot buy somebody who loves a place enough to spend twelve years photographing it and then give the results away. That part has to be donated.

I donated it. Somebody else invoiced for it.

What I Am Doing About It

Very little, in Nextdoor’s direction. I reported the advertisement, said I did not approve of it and that I should be compensated. I expect neither, and I am not going to spend my life arguing with an advertising server.

What I am doing instead is what I should have been doing all along: putting the real work where I control it.

This website carries no advertising network and never will. No third-party ads. No sponsors I have not personally agreed to. Nothing appearing beside a photograph that I did not choose. If you find something on this site next to my work, I put it there.

The Portland Field Guide lives here. The funny page lives here, still free, still downloadable, with my domain on the images so they can travel without losing where they came from. Prints and downloads are here, priced by me. A membership starts at three dollars a month, and the people who pay it are worth more to me than any number of views on somebody else’s property.

I will keep posting to the neighborhood, because the neighborhood is the point, and because Nextdoor is still the best way I have found to reach it. But the good work comes home first, and the link comes with it.

This Is Bigger Than Nextdoor

I have been picking on one company because one company put an advertisement on my owl. But the arrangement is everywhere, and it is worth seeing whole.

Every social network runs on the same bargain. Artists, musicians, photographers and writers upload their very best work — not their outtakes, their best — and they do it for free, because the platform holds out the possibility of being discovered. That possibility is real. It is also rare.

What is not rare is the advertising. The platform monetizes the ones who break through and the ones who never do, identically. It does not need any individual artist to succeed — it only needs all of them to keep uploading. Whatever happens to the artist, the network gets paid. In most cases the network is the only party that does.

It reminds me of the American dream, and I mean that with all the affection and all the suspicion the phrase deserves. Work hard, be good, get noticed, get rewarded. Some people genuinely do. Enough do that the promise stays believable. But it is sold as a meritocracy and it operates as a lottery — and the house takes its cut of every single ticket, winning or losing.

I am fifty-four. I have played hundreds of gigs in this city, been on the radio, had music on television, and given away more photographs than I have ever sold. I am not bitter about any of it and I would do it again. But I have learned the one thing worth passing on: hope is not a business model, and somebody else’s platform is not your career. Post there. Reach people there. Just do not mistake the building for something you own.

And If You Run a Local Business

There is an obvious conclusion sitting in that arithmetic, so let me say it plainly.

My photographs reached 103,000 people in southeast Portland across three posts. National advertisers paid to sit next to them — I have the screenshots. Nobody spends money on that placement by accident, which means the commercial value of this audience is not my opinion. It has already been established by companies with media buyers and budgets.

The only unusual thing about it is who received the payment.

So if you sell bird seed, garden plants, cameras or binoculars in this city, consider the alternative. You could reach exactly those neighbors for less than a platform is charging you — with your name on work I actually made, in a place where no other advertising is competing for attention, and with my genuine recommendation attached rather than an algorithm’s indifference.

I would choose you. That is the difference.

And if you are a photographer, musician, writer or artist who has watched advertising appear beside work you gave away, I would like to hear from you. Not to organize a boycott — I have no interest in that. Just to find out how common this is, and to say so out loud.

Because in the end this was never really about the money.

It was about consent.

Now You Weigh In

I have made my case, and I am aware I am not a neutral party in it. So I would genuinely like to hear where you land — including if you think I am wrong. Comments are open on this post, which is unusual for me.

Some questions I do not have settled answers to:

• If a service is free and you agreed to the terms, is this simply the deal — and should I stop complaining and go make more photographs?
• Should a platform need your permission before placing a paid advertisement inside a post that carries your name and your face?
• Is there a difference between an advertisement near someone’s work and one attached to it? I think there is. I am not certain I can define the line.
• Does it matter that the advertiser contradicted what the photograph was about, or is that just my problem for having opinions?
• Has this happened to you? If you make anything — music, photographs, writing, woodwork, sourdough — and you have watched somebody sell advertising against it, I would like to know.

I am not looking for agreement and I am not organizing anything. I would just rather have this conversation somewhere the comments are not for sale.