Hello all
I started the Kosmo Foto (formerly Zorki Photo) blog in 2012, after more than decade collecting film cameras and shooting film as often as I could.
It's been a source of huge pride that the blog has grown from nothing into a site that gets several hundred thousands page views a year, and has led to both the Kosmo Foto film brand and our online camera shop Cameraburo.
The site takes hundreds of hours of my time every year and costs a considerable amount to keep ticking along – hosting, design, back-end admin, malware, analytics and more.
Adverts have been the best way to keep the site in the black, but in the past few years this model has been under attack.
The rise of AI search – especially on Google, the site that sends the majority to visitors to sites like mine – has been particularly worrying. AI scours my posts and stories without compensation, lifts the information on them, and uses that to create AI answers which stop people clicking on my site. It's a serious problem that many other bloggers and publishers are having to grapple with.
I want to keep Kosmo Foto as a blog that is free to read. It has also made sense to do more with 'Advance/Rewind', the newsletter you've all signed up to. This newsletter already has a community of more than 3,000 readers, and I'm excited to continue building it over the coming months and years.
From this month, I'm starting a subscriber version of 'Advance/Rewind" that will help pay for Kosmo Foto's running costs.
You can subscribe either monthly ($5) or for a full year ($48, saving you more than 20%). You can pay for the monthly tier either every month or every quarter.
Subscribers will get access to paid-tier-only posts that won't be available on the blog, as well as stories that are published on the paid tier before they come to Kosmo Foto. I'll also be giving advance warning of new products coming to Kosmo Foto.
Many thanks in advance to anyone who's happy to support the blog. Publications like Kosmo Foto may find it much more difficult to exist without the help of loyal readers.
Thanks for reading
Stephen Dowling
Kosmo Foto