Corbis has notified photographers with rights-managed images on Veer that the company will be moving all that imagery to the Corbis site in 2010 to more “strategically differentiate their two stock photography brands.” The rights-managed imagery that has been placed on channel partner sites around the world will continue to be marketed through those sites.
The Veer site will be marketed as a value offering, while the Corbis site will be marketed as premium. According to Nairn Nerland, senior vice president of marketing, “value customers want to know before beginning a search what a certain file size of any image will cost. And they want the assurance that they can safely use the image for everything they do, all the time, forever.” Once that decision is dealt with, the price element is out of the way, and the customer can move on to finding an image that works for a project. Most microstock sites display prices on the home page. When the customer moves on to do a search, the price issue is already settled.
There will continue to be four levels of pricing on Veer: way cheap (from $1), cheap ($9 to $100), spendy ($49 to $350) and worth it ($49 to $655). In the default search, customers will see images at all price points, but if price is an issue, they will be able to filter the search to only view images in certain price ranges.
All rights-managed images licensed based on a use will be in the Corbis premium collection. Some of the higher priced royalty-free brands will be found on both Corbis and Veer.
Nerland outlined four elements that customers use to distinguish between value from premium. These are price, uniqueness, license flexibility and file resolution available.
It is important to recognize that premium images may be priced lower than some of the Veer collection’s value imagery. This will happen when usage is small and limited. Premium does not mean premium price. When it comes to quality, there may be little or no differences between certain premium and value images. Images in some of the higher priced collections on Veer will surely be considered by most buyers to be of higher quality than some of the images on Corbis that are licensed as rights-managed. Within the value range, there will be sales for prices up to $655. There will be premium sales for as little as a few dollars. The defining difference between the two collections is price or quality, but the way the images are licensed (rights-managed vs. royalty-free).
Nerland explained that customers want simplicity. They define simplicity as not wanting to bother searching through images that are more expensive than they can afford. With rights-managed pricing, the customer must define the use, often using a complicated set of parameters, before she can determine the cost. Sometimes, negotiation is required, and it is hard to begin that process until a specific image has been chosen. However, when prices are based on use, customers often have a wider selection of images from which to choose, and the price is often lower than some of the more expensive royalty-free imagery.