$250K+ a Year Selling Old Newspaper Photos

Historic Images sells original press photos from old newspaper archives on eBay, mostly for $22–$25.

They’ve sold 1.67M photos across their stores since 2009, and I reckon they’re still probably doing $250K+ a year 🤯

The same idea works at a much smaller scale.

Judy Konopka sells cleaned-up old photos on Etsy, a lot of them American towns, from around $35 a print.

Main streets in Toledo, Buffalo, Worcester and Fall River, mostly 1900 to the 1940s 👀

The shop, HistoricalPix, has made 6,300+ sales since 2016, with reviews like this one…

I work on Madison Ave and love historical pics of downtown Toledo and this one is great quality

At $35 a print, my rough maths puts Judy north of $200K in sales over the years 🤑

A newer example is TheCapitalOfArt on Etsy, which opened in 2023 and has 10K+ sales of digital bundles of vintage archive images, like a WW1 set of 5500+ photos.

Plenty of old photos are free to use, like the Library of Congress set of main street shots from across the US, going back to the 1850s.

Pick your own town, dig up its old main street photos (making sure they’re free of copyright issues), and list them on Etsy as prints through a print-on-demand partner.

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