Dramatic Royalty Increase At VideoBlocks Marketplace

Posted on 1/29/2015 by Jim Pickerell | Printable Version | Comments (0)

Image creators always want a higher royalty. How’s 100% of what the customer pays? At Videoblocks Marketplace that’s what contributor will receive when their HD and 4K video clips are used. Too good to be true? Read on.

Currently Videoblocks offers subscribers unlimited access to about 100,000 video clips for $99 per year. On average each clip is downloaded about 110 times a year, but many of the clips are seldom if ever downloaded. Less than 10% of the clips are responsible for over 90% of the downloads.

The company currently has more than 100,000 customers who are very happy with the value they receive, but who are also forced to go to Shutterstock, GettyImages, Pond5 and other video suppliers for many of the clips they need because creators were not willing to place some of their best work on Videoblocks due to the relatively low royalties offered.



To attract the higher quality content Videoblocks decided to create a second higher priced offering they call Marketplace. On Videoblocks Marketplace the prices for HD and 4K clips are significantly lower than the prices their competitors charge. But, the royalty paid for each use is significantly higher than competitors pay. Videoblocks is able to do this because rather than taking 70% of every download fee to operate their business, the company has structured its business to cover operating costs and profits out of the basic $99 recurring subscription fees.

For the $99 subcribers still get unlimited access to the more than 100,000 clips (and growing) in the basic Videoblocks collection. But, subscribers will also be given the choice of searching the Marketplace for other clips that might be of interest. When they find a clip they want to use they pay an additional $49 for each HD clip or $199 for each 4K clip that they download. This is still a significant savings for customers who are asked has to pay $79 for an HD clip and $299 for a 4K clip at Shutterstock.



Meanwhile, since videographers get 100% of the fee the customer pays they will earn more than twice as much for each clip downloaded than they would have earned if the clip were to be downloaded from Shutterstock. A win-win for both creators and consumers.

Videoblocks has just begun asking contributors to upload their footage to Marketplace. They already have more than 200,000 clips in the collection. All submissions are non-exclusive so contributors can continue to offer their work through other competitors and sell the work anywhere they choose.  Interested contributors can go to http://contribute.videoblocks.com/ for more information and to begin uploading.

For the time being Videoblocks is only building the collection. The collection will be available to subscribers in April at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show in Las Vegas.



Joel Holland, VideoBlocks CEO says, "We launched VideoBlocks in 2010 to make premium stock video affordable to everyone, regardless of budget. But our customers wanted more choice. We came up with this concept of the Marketplace to provide a deeper library to our customers but also at price points that were much more reasonable than Shutterstock or Pond5." 

The new marketplace is built with 4K footage in mind and features a streamlined upload and metadata input process that should ease the pain points for those already shooting most of their footage at higher resolutions. "Right now, the other stock footage companies can't accept Red's R3D as a file type," says Holland. "Shooters have to render it out as a Photo-JPEG and on those sites upload that output, then go back and upload the source file to connect them. It's a very cumbersome process. We're the first group to be able to accept R3D files right out of the camera. It took us a very long time to get there, but we built our own custom encoding platform to be able to offer this to our contributors."


Copyright © 2015 Jim Pickerell. The above article may not be copied, reproduced, excerpted or distributed in any manner without written permission from the author. All requests should be submitted to Selling Stock at 10319 Westlake Drive, Suite 162, Bethesda, MD 20817, phone 301-461-7627, e-mail: wvz@fpcubgbf.pbz

Jim Pickerell is founder of www.selling-stock.com, an online newsletter that publishes daily. He is also available for personal telephone consultations on pricing and other matters related to stock photography. He occasionally acts as an expert witness on matters related to stock photography. For his current curriculum vitae go to: http://www.jimpickerell.com/Curriculum-Vitae.aspx.  

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