Getty Images has been focusing on
growing its subscription business. The theory is that subscriptions will make customers more dependent on the company for their future needs. Currently, subscriptions represent 37% to 38% of Getty’s Creative Revenue and about 50% of Editorial Revenue.
However, subscriptions really don’t work for many customers. They need fewer images overall and their their needs vary greatly week-to-week, month-to-month. For such customers it is more cost effective to pay a higher price for just what they need, when they need it.
A significant portion of the stock photo business will always be for single image use unless it becomes so important to have them registered in the “subscription column” that they are given subscriptions for 2 or 5 images at greatly reduced prices from single image purchases. The same principle is true for individual copies of magazines and newspapers.
Shutterstock started out as 100% subscription, but a few years ago they discovered that there was a limit to the number of customers interested in subscriptions no matter how many images you offered them, or how low the price. The last time Shutterstock provided a detailed enough breakdown of revenue (
Feb 2015) to enable us to estimate Subscription revenue it was about 44% of gross revenue. The rest was single image of video downloads. Subscription is very likely under 40% now.
Total downloads have plateaued for Shutterstock in recent quarters, and indication are that there may not be that many more customers interested in subscriptions. Recently, Shutterstock introduced
new subscription packages to try to hold off the Getty challenge.
Neither company is likely to change their focus or emphasis on subscription sales. But is there a way they could earn more revenue for themselves and their contributors; provide a better service for the majority of their customers and still license rights to no more images than they are licensing now?
A Better Option
The major problem with the current stock photography subscription strategy is that for the most part, every item is priced exactly the same.
Instead of giving customers a specific number of downloads subscriptions could provide customers with a specific number of credits for a fixed time period. The credits could then be used to buy images at different price points.
Getty already has a credit system for purchasing single images and Shutterstock has its “On Demand” system, but Subscription credits would be different. Currently, with a single iStock credit a customer can purchase one non-exclusive image; 3 credits are required to purchase an exclusive image. Customers can save money by purchasing larger packages of credits and these credits never expire.
On
Gettyimages.com one-off purchases are based on the file size delivered, but when it comes to Premium Access deals which are effectively subscription arrangements it appears that the customer can download any images they want, RM or RF, for a fixed monthly payment negotiated based on the customer’s need.
Instead of prices for 750 of 250 downloads a month allow the customer to purchase 750 or 250 credits. Then the customer must use 1 credit to purchase an Essential image or 3 credits to purchase a Signature image. They could purchase any combination of these images as long as they don’t run out of credits.
Within each of these collections Getty could then designate that a higher number of credits be paid for the more popular images – say 2 credits for an Essentials image that had been downloaded more than once and 4 credits for a Signature image used more than once.
The same credit system could also be easily adapted to the Gettyimages.com website as part of the whole “Unification” process. For images never downloaded previously they might charge 4 credits for any RF image and 6 credits for an RM image. Higher credits could be specified for more popular images with a download history.
It seems the problem with the Premium Access system is that the Getty sales people are giving customers all the images they want for whatever they say they can afford to pay. The system I propose would eliminate some of the lowest priced sales and put some floor on prices. Customers who truly need more images can focus their searches on the images that have never been used by anyone.
Subscription credits would expire at the end of 30 days and would not roll over locking the customer into buying an additional subscription every 30 days.
Customers with a budget should be able to search for only those images that require a certain number of credits. In this way customers with budget issues could more easily search sections of the collection for images within their budget. This could result, not only in higher prices for some uses, but surface images that have been buried out of customer sight by today’s one-price-fits-all system.
Shutterstock
Shutterstock needs such a system because they need some way to raise subscription prices on at least some of their subscription images. Charging more for images that previous customers had shown an interest in by downloading would seem a logical way to solve the problem.
Shutterstock has over 134 million images in its collection. In the last quarter they reported that only 41.1 million images were downloaded. Clearly, a significant percent of the images in the collection are never viewed or considered by any customer. If a higher price is designated for some images there will still be plenty of images available at the lowest price.
Such a system also opens the door to segmenting these large image collections in a number of other ways based on actual customer demand. The segmenting can be done almost entirely through the use of algorithms and does not require costly curation.