An agent who has operated a small, specialist agency specializing in RM licensing for years contacted me recently and asked the following question. “I’m reworking (or trying to figure out) image pricing in bundle form (similar to OFFSET STOCK PHOTOS). I’m wondering if you’ve talked to them about whether their program might/might not be working?" Here’s my response.
The last I heard Offset contributors were seeing about 1 download annually for every 10 images they had in the collection. The average gross price per download was about $337 since Offset sells about the same number of images at the “Small” price as the “Large” price.
They have added more images since I got these figures. As best I can tell the number of sales hasn’t been going up so that might mean that currently they are licensing 1 image annually for every 12 to 15 images in the collection.
You have to remember that thanks to their advertising and promotion Shutterstock has a huge number of customers from all over the world looking at these images. There just aren’t that many customers willing to pay high prices anymore. The problem you face is getting enough customers to even look at and consider your images when there are so many good, much cheaper images easily available.
My bet is that AdobeStock is doing somewhat better with their Premium collection than Offset. Their prices are $250 for a large file and $120 for a small one. From what I hear Adobe’s sales in general are going up while Shutterstock’s sales overall are flat. On the other hand, I have no idea how well the Premium collection is doing compared to Adobe’s regular collection.
To attract customers today, I think you must offer a price for “Web Use” only. Otherwise, I don’t think you will get enough people coming to your site to make any kind of volume sales at the higher prices.
The pricing strategy I like is that of
Stocksy’s. Their prices start at $15 for web use and go to $125 with additional charges for Extended Licenses.
Check out this
story for another strategy. Included is a pricing schedule that one photographer is using on his own personal site. I don’t know how much traffic he is getting, but I think this strategy is the right approach to the existing market.
You might also want to check out this
story to get an idea of Getty’s current pricing and just how much that is destroying the market. When customers can get both RM and RF images from Getty for these prices it is hard to get them to pay more. Eleven percent of Getty’s sales are still above $100, but 73% are for gross prices less than $20 and the percentage in this lower price range keeps rising.
Another story you might want to take a look at is this
2017 story about Todd Klassy’s business. He has a personal site and has structured it so virtually all his customers find him through Google searches. He doesn’t have any automatic prices and negotiates everything directly. His average price per image licensed in 2017 was $601.42. In 2018 his revenue was up 15% compared to 2017. There is additional information about his operation in this
story.