Is 7 bucks what your photo is worth?

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