I’m starting to do some online research into stock photography and found this interesting site. Too bad it looks like Bahar Gidwani is shutting down DIMdump. But there’s lots of good stuff, like this post about pricing models that got me thinking that the limited download smugmug pricing options I mentioned in my last post may not be so bad. Also, some encouragement from Bahar’s final post.
Bahar’s final post has some encouragement in point #4.
4. There is always room around the edges. When I first took our agency on line, people were amazed that we had a digital library of 30,000 images. Nowadays, it is not uncommon to see libraries of four million or ten million images. Even so, there is room for hundreds of thousands more images–if you move away from the mainstream, and work around the edges. The same is probably true for the remaining smaller stock agencies. There should be plenty of room for them, around the edges of the industry.
I knew that I was going to have to specialize and “work around the edges”, but it’s nice to see that confirmed.
In my previous post about SmugMug, I had lamented the lack of pricing options for downloads. Bascially smugmug offers a personal or commercial license, and pricing levels for each can be set based on 1mb, 4mb or original file size. Also, the text of the license displayed is VERY short, one paragraph. There’s no option for pricing based on usage. But after reading Bahar’s post about the complexity of rights managed and even royalty-free images, I’m thinking the SmugMug model may be just fine.
A comment in that post is further encouragement that I’m on the right track.
If you are an artist and agree with my analysis, you should be shifting your production towards royalty free material.