My side gig working for Google as a 360 photographer didn’t quite ‘pan’ out

Follow your passion, they said.

There are lots of irresponsible views out there about following your passion. While the advice is often well-intentioned, dropping everything to merely follow your passion, can prove to be disastrous.

Fortunately, my unprofitable work for Google was just a side-gig. Let me tell you what happened. This story illustrates the hidden costs of attempting to earn cash through a side-hustle and the genius of Google as they employ hundreds of thousands of willing contributors, to interactively map the world for them.

In 2016, I joined a Google program called “Local Guides”

“By sharing reviews, photos, and knowledge about the places around you, you can help inform millions of people”

This sounded perfect. A chance for me to ignite my passion [360 photography], and be rewarded. But how would I be rewarded?

• Google discounts on movies and music!
• A digital badge that distinguished my published work and profile throughout the Street View app
• Trusted brand assets and the right to market myself as a trusted photographer/agency (gosh, I can be a whole Agency?!)
• More exposure with my work being featured in the Mountain View Chocolate Factory for-hire index
• Paid leads as local businesses request shoots

I couldn’t wait to start. This sounded great. My work for Google began in early 2016. I’d invested in a Ricoh Theta-S, a spherical camera to simplify the complex process of capturing and creating spherical photos and videos down to a single button press.

The camera uses two ultrawide-angle lenses to capture a fully spherical image when stitched together in camera.

This investment brought the cost of my content start-up to USD $300. So far, so affordable. I began the journey to become a local guide and I felt like some kind of VR pioneer. This was pretty straightforward, the idea being that you take a spherical, 360 degree photo using the Theta-S, simply upload it to street view, and gain points which build up your local guide ranking. Google would then screen your pictures for eligibility and award 5 points for each geo-tagged picture which met their standards.

I was fascinated by this clever combination of photography, crowdsourcing, and gamification and was more than willing to play along.

My first photos were an attempted at some differentiated employer branding. For those not working in the recruitment marketing business, employer brand is basically a combination of the internal and external brand perception of your workplace. 360 pics presented a way to overcome the commonly asked question of people interested in working where you do, which is “what does the office look like?” without having to give them an actual guided tour.

My first shots were here in Singapore, and I used the newly refurbished MediaCom office as a place to start.

You can visit the 360 version on Street View here.

My next bunch of shots were in the GroupM Mumbai office, in India. I actually took enough of them to create a virtual office tour using a tool called EasyPano. This went beyond just reviewing pictures in your VR headset, and enabled some interactivity through floating arrows, so you could navigate through the building. You can still take this tour, if you like, it’s here.

The picture quality of the early 360 cameras of 2016 was a bit lacking, as the image has to be stretched in order to be spherical. The “whole scene” is HD, but your “field of view” is just a small portion of that.

It was then I hit a financial bump. I’d accidentally underestimated the file size of a 360 picture. Some of these pictures were 5–7mb, and I was on roaming in India so I ended up paying about $100 per photo to get them uploaded, and I upped 17 in total. Now my side-gig running costs were up to over $2000.

By now I had to invest in a headset to view my shots. I’d carefully considered the options for HMDs (Head Mounted Displays) and didn’t want to drop more than $150 on a viewer for my shots, so I plumped for a Samsung Gear VR.

At this point I was hooked on publishing. Google has such a soft and crafty gamification layer including direct marketing (email)

And naturally, there’s a dashboard for you to login and check your status, although the mobile version is a bit lacklustre.

At this point, a whole year after I bought my Theta, I thought it was worth investing in a better camera, and so I picked up a duty-free Samsung Gear VR camera whilst passing through Changi Airport in Singapore for $240. I was encouraged by the popularity of my 360 pictures and I was at 5000 views.

Spurred on by Google’s Gamification layer, I continued to upload more and more photos, undeterred if I had one or 2 of them rejected. I had been informed by the incentives layer that there would be “perks” on offer for the loyal local guide aspirants, publishing high quality pictures on a regular basis. I was eager to find out how Google were going to recognise my hard work across multiple countries, my years of indentured servitude to the almighty StreetView.

After lots of angst, reading, learning and making mistakes, now my pictures were getting pretty good.

Without even realising, I’d managed to put my new side-gig business more than $2000 in the red. I sure would need a big reward from Google. I was so excited to discover how they would be rewarding me when I got to 50 approved 360 photos.

These are just the fixed expenditures. I imagine for each picture It probably took 1 hour, so I need to include a 50x hourly rate into the costs.

I finally crossed the 50 pictures milestone in August of 2017, which is why I wrote this. How was I compensated by Google?

The moral(s) of this story are:

Don’t expect your passion to turn a profit. Turning something you love into a job (or even a side hustle) might not net you the money to accommodate basic needs like food and shelter.

Make sure you aren’t being gamed for someone else’s profit. Companies like Uber, Tencent and Google are mastering data science dark arts, and applying tricks from games , essentially pulling psychological levers that compel you to fulfil tasks which may not be the best use of your time or resources.