Is $7 The Magic Number For Microstock?
February 13, 2008
By Daryl Lang
As Corbis prepares to launch the first ad campaign for its micropayment site SnapVillage this month, the site is in the unique position to answer a vexing question: What's the right price for a royalty-free microstock image?
SnapVillage, unique among microstock sites, lets photographers assign their photos one of five prices ($1, $5, $10, $25 or $50). The hope is that photographers will monitor their sales and settle on the prices that generate the most revenue. (SnapVillage does not charge different prices depending on file size.)
Early figures at SnapVillage suggest the sweet spot is $7.
That's the average price of an individual SnapVillage image so far, according to Adam Brotman, senior vice president of SnapVillage.
Read the rest at PDN.
Let's see how this average sweet spot works out for SnapVillage. I appreciate them sharing the data with the community. Cutcaster will do the same for the betterment of licensing content online and finding the correct market price so both seller and buyers are happy.
I also asked Daryl about the footage market which he responded with this, "I tend to pay more attention to photos than video, since our readership is mostly photographers, but I’m glad to know about your site. I think Shutterstock recently lowered its prices for footage, and I think Getty did the same thing. It’s a really unsettled market right now, kind of where micropayment photos were 3-4 years ago." It's definitely a fragmented and highly segmented market ;-)
Thanks Daryl
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Is 7 bucks what your photo is worth?
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Cutcaster
Do you remember your first sale? We do!!!
It's interesting to see that some places are in fact looking at average prices, and allowing the marketplace to see that.
ReplyDeleteThis gives photographer's who work in RF imaging a chance at pricing their work within the probable sales range, but there is likely to be many photographers who see it as devaluing their work (traditional stock for instance). If they choose to price higher (say the $25 - $50 range) than the average they stand the chance of losing sales unless they have very unique images.
The other thing to keep in mind is whether or not their are differences to the licensing: if snapvillage is not charging different prices for different image sizes it could cause some problems with the average pricing. Some images are 4 megapixels, some are 12 megapixels (native sizes). Then there's the issue of whether an image is being used once on a website, or printed 10,000 times on a magazine cover.
The unfortunate thing is that many photographers will place the same image on a variety of sites: one site will sell it for $1 and another may sell it for $5 or $7.