hello all! i'm a brand new user here (still having my first submissions reviewed) and i'm having a hard time understanding the pricing trends.

in looking at illustrations VS photos it seems pretty much all illustrations max out at $5 regardless of the quality or complexity. yet photos (many of which look like little more than accidental "snap-shots" top out around $10

this seems kind of upside down to me. as the time required to create a mediocre illustration is typically far greater than to take a mediocre photo.

i also hear talk in the forums about photos selling for $100s of dollars. but most stuff i see is like $20 and lower.

i just wonder if someone could either briefly explain the thought process or maybe point me to existing threads that have already done so.

cheers.

Ya need to look around better. The low prices you state are not accurate. A great deal of footage and photos are selling at very high prices. Artist ImageSource has over 140,000 photos selling at well over $700 each. A photo example that sold and priced at $785 is:
and

Look at artist resource, there are dozens of footage selling for over $300 every week.
Selling price is a touchy issue to some artists. After being here since the beginning I know lots of artists that are making very good money here ... none that I know of sell footage for $20. Most are at least $50 and most much higher. Don't fool yourself in believing low prices is normal or the best way to sell more. Pricing is a perception of quality.

Last year P5 affiliated with a micro site and uploaded over 7 million dollar stock photos. That indeed started to hold back photo and illustration prices. You do not have to follow their lead, in fact the sellers that are here for a business do not follow their pricing.

Price what you know is needed to cover all your production costs, equipment, time, internet, software then add your profit. Don't get suckered into low prices help sales ... not true.
.
IMAGE SOURSE PORTFOLIO LINK

here is what i've done:

went to pond5.com
searched "wedding cake"
sorted by price
page one - max price was $10
page FOURTY TWO - max price was still $10
(and ironically, that photo wasnt remarkably worse than the one you posted above)

i dont know. maybe im looking in the wrong place.
can you clarify what you mean by "Look at artist resource"?

At the low part of the page is a link called artist resources. If you click it, then it will take you to a page that shows recent high value sales.

Sort by price is not the best search method. It sorts by lowest price, and there are millions to search through so you will never get past the worst stuff.

In reality, you have to sell at the level you need to cover your expenses. Photos are a very hard market here on P5 though, wish so much competition from people that would rather buy a 3000 dollar camera with the hopes of selling a ten dollar image. It is tough, and you will have to upload thousands of clips to get your foot in the door.

Footage, after effects and even audio may be more profitable for some people.

Rekindle is right though. Make sure you really master your composition, so you can compell to buyers that know a good photo. Those buyers aren't looking for a bargain, they are studying the image, and they will pay what they have to for its use. Study, shoot, study and shoot.

Hope that helps, this market gets more competitive every year, and you just have to be better and better to stay above the water.

ive looked all over several pages and cant find the artist resources link...
is it possibly a mac / chrome issue?

and why the heck would they bury the good stuff under some nebulous link?

so far, i have to say that pond5 is one of the kludgiest, websites ive been on in quite some time

Scroll down under my writing here, see resources?

It is third down in that column. I couldn't find it for a long time either. It is right at the bottom of the page here.

Or here.

yeah, i've seen "artists" (not "artist resources") but all that gives me is an alphabetical list of contributors. what good is that when doing an image search?

i truly hope there is something im missing and this is NOT actually the most retarded and backward website in the world ; )

WGZN isn't an approved artist yet. Nothing approved in his/her portfolio so he does not have access to see what is really selling in artist resources. He just needs to spend some time reviewing the last several years of forum threads. He will get his answers then.

ahhhh!

- for the record, i DID mention that in the first line of my post : D

but still, i dont get it. i have to be an approved contributor to get search access to the high end images? that seems completely backward from a revenue generation standpoint...

and i dont mind doing searches on my own - IF The info is there. and maybe it will be once im approved. but shouldnt this kind of thing be in a FAQ?

"and you will have to upload thousands of clips to get your foot in the door."

GOOD GOD! who has thousands of clips? and how long would all that take to get approved?

ive been shooting for nearly 20 years and i might have about a dozen clips that anyone other than the client who paid for the shoot would ever be able to use...

there is clearly a mentality here that im not getting my head around.
i guess i need to start thinking from the perspective of shooting FOR stock use rather than just selling my happy accidents.

@wgzn when you're searching the P5 database by price make sure the arrow head next to the "sort by" box is facing upwards, then you'll have the most expensive photos listed first.

And yeah unless you have exceptionally rare or unique content it helps if you have a portfolio running into the '000s

That is correct. I lot of people don't grasp that. Shooting images that can be used for concepts is something that people get better and better at. I started as shooting for journalism, so it is something I am still learning.

Rekindle was referring to the Artist Resources that you wont have access to until you get your clips or photos approved. You already have access to everything that is posted for sale, you just need to experiment with your search terms. Use number of sales or default though, if you use price you will only find the cheap stuff.

thanks guys.

yeah, my first searches i used "number of sales" to sort. figuring it would give me an idea of demand for certain subjects. and still ive yet to come across any illustration or photo over $20.

will keep nosing around.
how long does it usually take to get your first image(s) approved?

thanks to everyone for helping diffuse my frustration ; )

If you use price there is an arrow you can click that reverses the price sort of the clip / photo / illustration results. You will find very high priced illustration and photos.

I, too am a newbie to this site. Not to microstock sites in general.
This site is not very "user-friendly".
Having trouble also with pricing. Not used to that option.
Any suggestions for photography images would help ... still in review.

Don't follow the lead with low prices. Price them to sell once or twice and be able to recoup the expenses and make a profit.

as a new user here, im totally unjustified in saying this. but im not sure i agree with that.

ive been searching pretty aggressively here for the last few days and i see a LOT of random, mediocre footage for like $50 from contributors who have thousands of clips posted and the vast majority of what ive seen from them has zero downloads. a lot of these clips i'd be totally willing to buy (even just as placeholders) if the price was $10-$20.

i guess my logic is this. ive been a freelance designer for nearly 20 years and ive seen WAY more $1000 projects come across my desk than $10,000 projects. i dont generally buy stock from places like corbis or veer because they still price on a very old model of hundreds (or even thousands) of dollars per clip. and i think (well, i KNOW) that there are a lot of people out there who would buy more stock if you could get usable stuff that didnt cost a significant percentage of the project budget.

im not saying there isnt a large community out there still willing to spend big bucks on good footage (movie studios, news agencies, big corporations) and if thats the market youre angling for, thats great. but personally, if im going to post 5000 so-so clips, id rather sell them all for $1 than just hope 100 people will EVENTUALLY buy my $50 clips

and another question. many folks are saying that you need to post thousands of clips to make an impact. but unless somebody is searching by artist, why would your volume of clips come in to play?

again, new user here. so im more than happy for folks to tell me my logic doesnt apply to this particular site.

but i would assume that most buyers come here and do searches first, simply by keyword. so as long as you have GOOD content thats smartly keyworded and reasonably priced. id assume you'd begin moving content whether you had 1 clip or 1000 clips posted

At the risk of being the odd man out, I think in the absence of buyer/sales data which I need to accurately compare trends and make choices, I just use just simple economic thinking to help me understand and price.

I think, the cost of production (price of the Canon 5D, etc) has no relationship with the behavior of sales. Prices do follow logical trends. Prices operate like commodities in a free form market like Pond5. If there's lots of shots of lovely ducks in in pond, the price goes down. Shots on most topics can be sorted into grades of quality and appeal to the buyer, for example, ducks on a pond with releases for the baby ducks from the duck parents go for more. Within those grades (if there is demand), prices can have more upward power. Pricing down within the grade can make your shot more competitive with comparable shots of tracking shots of ducklings, all things being equal. Pricing up, if you have something hot works well too. Since I can only guess from my sales and can't see the actual search criteria used by the buyers (for example, boxes checked for price range) I can only guess how to price for the best number of sales. It's frustrating. I choose to guess treating Pond5 as a very simple commodity market. If you want to see my pricing strategy in detail, go to my BLOG. I am very open to evidence / arguments pointing in other directions. I do realize there are other factors in pricing, such as confidence in the seller / brand. I do this for a living, so I have tried to put my best thinking into action on pricing. How much I don't know, always amazes me...

I generally do a search of like videos that I have produced to see what others are selling for. I pretty much let that be my guide. If I have a video that I feel has some elements in it that the competition is lacking then I'll price it upwards, if I have one that just doesn't stand out like the others or I feel the resolution just isn't as crisp (I always click on the image magnification to see other's quality), I'll either delete it altogether or price it on the lower side. My feeling is you get what you pay for and I'm going to price it accordingly.

The reason your chances of selling are increased by having thousands of clips is that by nature you're going to cover more material and appeal to a more varied group of buyers. Of course they should be clips of value, not just filler.

wgzn, I think the idea is NOT to even bother uploading 5000 so-so clips. Take the time and build a portfolio with quality clips. Use a tripod, build or buy a camera slider for smooth shots, etc. Take the time to light the shots. My clips are priced from $20-$80. I know some people on here will call me a "bottom feeder" for pricing some of my clips at $20, but those $20 clips are like my B roll clips. For example, I was doing a beer pour video and my cat jumped up on the table and sniffed the beer. I had to cut it, but I still had a 5 second clip, nicely lit. If someone wants that for $20 they can have it. One man's trash is another man's treasure and I'm sure someone out there someday will need a cat sniffing a beer. I don't think its worth $30 or $40. What I won't do is price a clip for $20 when the competition is selling them for $40..that's just bad for business. You're putting a few dollars in your pocket and cheapening the industry in the process. That being said, I do feel there is a strong market for the $20 clip, as long as it truly worth $20 and not $40 or $50 clip. I see sellers on here using beautiful models and pricing clips at $300. I would too if I spent the time and investment in shooting that type of shot.

I'm still a small guy in this, but building up my portfolio a lot over the last couple of months. I know its going to be awhile before I see steady sales. One thing about selling stock is that the camera work is only half of it, you need to be innovative and use your imagination.

Ask around here at P5 to see if you can find anyone who is making $2000 a month or more and their clips are at $20 across the board. I would bet not many or maybe no one in that group. Then ask around here for artists that are making $2000 and significantly more each month and you will find many that sell at $60 and above across the board. Profit is all that counts, the number sold means absolutely nothing. The pricing discussion will never get a consensus here ;)

either way, it's really interesting. i've just posted a couple clips from last summers wildfires here in texas. so i did a quick filename search, referenced, price, vs age, vs number of purchases vs what i'd (as an editor) consider a good looking and useful clip. and it seems that you get the most downloads at the $30-$80 range but only ONE (that i noticed at least) sold for over $100, and it only sold one. so in the case of firemen. it looks like $30-$80 is the sweet spot depending on how dramatic your shot is...

thanks for all the input. it's all been quite helpful!

30 to 80 is a good baseline for most material, unless it is more unique or contains model released people, which can cost more.

Pricing is an interesting animal. I am not sure how pond5 works with stock video because I am an audio producer, but margin is the key. There are tons of sites that offers formulas to calculate margin. So to keep the math easy if you sold stock for $10 and you made 5$ profit, if you lowered your price 20% to $8 and you made 4$ profit you would have to sell 25% more (5/4=1.25 or 25%) to make the same amount of profit. The same is true if you want to use bigger numbers like $100 a clip lowered 20% is $80 dollars with the same being true that you have to sell 25% more to make the same profit. So if you sell 10 clips at 100 a month your gross profit would be $1000. Have the 50% commission taken out and your left with $500 bucks net profit. To equal that same profit level at $80 a clip you need to sell 12.5 so basically 13 clips to get the same profit.

I guess when it comes to pricing you need to really think about whether lowering your price will really stimulate that increase, and with the large selection of clips available more then likely it probably would make absolutely no difference. Just to put it in perspective if the clips sell for 100 and you reduce your price 50% to 50$ a clip you'd have to sell 20 clips just to break even. Those prices are just general for easy math but you start to see how lowering your prices to rock bottom really hurts you more then it stimulates sales. Especially in a marketplace with so much variety and competition.

There is a lot of interesting points of view in this thread and I totally agree with a lot of them. Just remember no body wins in a race to the bottom. Focus on quality, variety, and upload regularly, and the sales will come. Price in a way that covers your costs, and still leaves profit. Remember that in business margin rules and if your not making profit you wont be in business for very long.

Couldn't agree more

I would rather sell 10 clips at $60 than 20 clips at $30.

There is an old saying in business "turnover is vanity, profit is sanity". I guess in stock video it should be "sales are for vanity, profit is for sanity".

TE

"but you start to see how lowering your prices to rock bottom really hurts you more then it stimulates sales."

from a math standpoint certainly. but it seems here like there is a price point at which the odds of people buying AT ALL or in any kind of reasonable timeframe start to fall off pretty quickly.

looking at the ages of clips. the guy with the $100 clip sold ONE in three years. but the guy with the $40 clip sold like 13 in less than one year. and that $40 clip wasnt compositionally much better or worse than the $100 one.

"I would rather sell 10 clips at $60 than 20 clips at $30."

why?

i guess if you could do either in the same amount of time it might make one feel better from an ego standpoint to fetch a higher price. but what if it takes you three years to sell those 10 clips? as opposed to a few months to move the 20?

from where i sit, thats $600 from either direction ; ) and technically having the greater volume of traffic through your "door" might increase the odds of repeat sales. - though i have no idea if its common for folks to shop by contributor here...

wqzn

The first thing I learnt here is that you will never be able to figure out what sells and why.

I have clips here that I was convinced would sell and they haven't. Equally I put up some shots "just because I had them" and they have sold. This is a prime example:



The other thing you need to consider is the perception of the buyer. Have a look at my other thread Conversation with a stock buyer - one of the things that was discussed was that you can make footage "too cheap" so that people disregard it as probably shot by someone that doesn't know what they are doing (or they wouldn't "give away" their labour!).

Ultimately you (as we all do) need to decide if you are doing this as a business or as a hobby.

TE

I think that is a great video Engineer. I agree, I have sold more clips I took on a whim than those I planned out and personally liked and thought would sell. As I said I have quite a few $20 clips, but they are worth $20. For whatever reason, maybe I had to bump up the ISO too high and it looks grainy at larger sizes, or maybe I had to cut it to 5 seconds due to camera shake or whatever. I'm not selling $40 clips for $20. In fact, most of my $20 clips are about to go up to $30.

I think the real question here is "are these cheap clips actually generating more buyers overall?" If the answer is no, which I think it is, then all you're doing is reducing overall revenue and cheapening the industry. That buyer who scores and pays $30 for a $60 clip will expect to pay that next time.

"I would rather sell 10 clips at $60 than 20 clips at $30."


I'd rather sell to 20 people at $60 ;-)

I can back up that low prices do not increase profit and did little to nothing on number of sales. For the newbies here, last year I dropped pricing on over 2,500 HD footage clips. Down to a ridiculous $15 each. I left the prices for six months. I believe anything less than 6-12 months is too short to get any accurate analysis. Even a year may be too short. Fact was the number of sales increased only marginally if any but profit dropped to an unacceptable level. Now last year was a transitional year for P5. They played with the search algorithm a lot. Still I fully believe that there is a perception of quality based on prices. I continue now to sell the same $15 clips for $50-60 almost every week. I as most of the artists that are making a USA level income really believe low prices hurts individually. There are dozens of artists making great money. I have yet to hear of anyone making $2,000 plus a month here at P5 that sells a substantial part of their portfolio for less than $50 or even $60.

If there are any artists that sell for $20-30 each and make in excess of $2,000 a month here at P5 lets hear from you.

BUT, the market for HD footage is not at $5 or even $20. IStockPhoto it's above $90, Alamy is way above $90. SS is $79. All the other agencies are not selling enough to even be considered. RS even raised the low end limit and increased the high end limit. I also had five restaurants as a business that the franchise focused on low prices to bring in the hordes of cheap customers. My sales were in excess of $4 million a year and that was also no profit. I'm out of that mess after struggling for eight years doing it. When the company raised prices it stabilized the closing of stores and a profit is being made by more of it's owners. In retail there are definitely slow months. January after Christmas spending and September after school starts and mom and dad are broke from tuition and clothes.

I do see you advocate starting at $100, that is admirable. Changing prices each month based on the calendar does not work in stock. It takes at least a year to determine if a clip will sell well. Heck, every sale I've made I raise prices. Dropping pricing in Dec does not work the same as retail. In the USA 325 million people are Christmas shopping for electronics, clothes, toys and books. Stock buyers are business and education buyers, there are far fewer and all have a specific need or subject requirement. Most anyone will buy a cheap book for curiosity, people will not buy a cheap clip for curiosity.

Stock footage is not like the local dollar store, everyone has books, bread and mouse traps. Stock is a very niche business where subject is far more important than price. Quality and subject sells, there has been many threads from dedicated footage buyers here, most say that rock bottom prices scares them ... perception of quality is real.

Oh by the way the average HD footage here at P5 is over $64 and the average of all clips is over $50, far below SS and IS which are both very big players. So for the newbies, listen to those artists that are making a profit, it makes sense. Do you want to earn $200 a month or $3000 a month? We have not heard from any P5 artist that sells for $20 or even $30 across their portfolio and is making $2000 plus a month. I think that tells the story. Selling books or pizza is not the same.

Why would you say they will go to iStock and get something better? It is much of the same inventory.

Your declining price policy wont work on a database of millions of clips. Only very few files sell at the rate you are describing.

Lowering prices does not increase demand. If people need a video of a pig, lowering the price of a lightning storm video isn't going to make them decide they need a lightning storm video instead. Your pig video just has to wait until someone needs one of those, and they will pay your reasonable price. Much of this is a waiting game.

I do agree that holding out for extreme high prices is not profitable, but trying to make money at $5 a clip is a joke. Unless your $5 clip sells 30 times a month, it isn't worth it, and it isn't going to sell much more frequently.

SS is a good baseline value, and they are a leader in the market, so I base my profit on that. If at SS you get 33%, and here you get 50%, I aim to make the same profit on sales by lowering my prices here a bit.

Not sure what volume of pricing people think they are going to get by lowering to five or ten $, but producers are not going to need that clip any more often, and if it is bad quality, they aren't going to go for the discount rate material to make a professional product. They know that you get what you pay for.

Someone has been chewing to many Erythroxylum novogranatense leafs and he's delusional thinking he'll make a fortune selling at low prices. Don't quit your day job.

Unless low prices are bringing in more customers, then its really just lowering the overall revenue for stock footage sales. I mean, just to throw a number out there...let's say there are 10,000 buyers a week for all the stock footage companies combined...if clips sold for $50 clip on average that's $500,000 in sales...if the same number of buyers get clips for $5 a clip, then that is only $50,000. If you mix up the $5 sellers and the $50 sellers, I'm sure the $5 sellers will get a good share of the reduced profit, but the overall profit is still considerably reduced....so instead of 10,000 buyers a week, you'd now need 100,000 buyers a week to match your previous profits with $50 clips...I'm not so sure $5 clips are going to bring in ten times the amount of customers, and if not then you've actually given away a considerable profit overall. I don't think this is the type of business where people are just going to buy stock footage on a whim just because it is cheap. They either need it or they don't.

Sorry that is hard to believe. Quality takes money, and if not for stock you would have paid thousands more. If your logic was true, the sales on artist resources would not exist. Quality clips continue to sell upwards of $300.

If you were making commercials from five dollar clips, I am sure the value was apparent to the customer.

If you think tv broadcast video should sell for $5, shot on thousands of dollars worth of equipment, sellers would need a stock of at least 50,000 clips just to buy lunch and gas. Whatever you may believe, that is just ridiculous to expect.

You can thank god that some contributors are desperate enough to take massive losses from cost of gear and time vs. profits, but most are not, and P5 will probably follow suit and raise minimums at some point.

Makes no sense with your argument. If you are making advertisements with $5 clips I wish you the best. Sounds like a bad business model when you have a contract for 100 advertisements and can't afford $250 for 5 quality clips. Like Physics stated. look at artists resources. At $50 or $60 and up P5 continues to be the cheapest prices anywhere and with the fairest commission to sellers. The reality is, and many will find this harsh ... we don't need $5 buyers. There are stock footage companies that sell cheaper, when you need your $5 clip go there and stop trying to make anyone here believe that is standard or needed to sell. Guess what ya can't find what ya want there ;) if ya can then stay there.

The concept of $50 starting price for HD clips is cheap. It's like an echo, there are dozens of artists selling nothing less than $50 who make $2,000 or more a month here. The industry has been damaged by sellers who are happy with $200 or buyers who want $5-20 clips. In reality ... don't need either one.

Bottom line, if IS, SS or quality P5 footage is too expensive for your advertisements then shoot them yourself. Bet ya can't do it ... that's why you came to stock. I also bet there are lots of great artists here at P5 that would love to take over the 95 advertisements you failed to fulfill.

Ya just don't get it. $50 is not high priced, the lowest in the industry that is successful. $150 clips sell very very well here. It's the subject not the low price that sells. If the subject is right and quality good the bottomline profit will go to a higher priced clip and not volume at lower prices.

The bottomline; profit is all that counts, anyone who is here for bragging rights on number sold is marginally insane if they are not making a profit.

Not likely. The costs to produce are high. Most people that sell $5 junk are not around for long. P5 could not even sustain their curator staff counting on $2.50 profit.

I don't think your logic is sound. It is not going to be an 'across the board' five dollar industry. P5 and its contributors would fail. The volume of consumers is finite, which means lowering prices doen not increase demand.

Good luck though.

@dtiberio, we used to have a guy like you on P5. He had 16000 clips which he sold for $10. After one year he was so disappointed and bitter, he requested P5 to delete his account.

My advice to you:
Raise your prices to $40.
If your bottom line is lower - you can always go back to $10.
If your bottom line is higher - raise the prices to $50 and so on until your bottom line stabilized.

What do you have to lose?

WRONG.
The older clip is promoted by P5 because of their MERITOCRATIC strategy.
It will see many more sales.
The new clip will not see the daylight for several months and it will always lag behind.

Also adding flaw to your theory is the search default value added during curation. If it is not the same curator, in the same mood, then it will not be valued the same search priority. All clips are not weighed equally, and weight is given during curation.

dtiberio, I mean this with respect, but you and I have about the same amount of clips. I have made almost as much with the sale of one clip, as your yearly total profit. I am a very small fish here with a relatively low price inventory. It would take you ten years to pay off a t3i with kit lens using your current pricing strategy. If your intent is to someday make a profit, you are wrong.

I started out with the same mindset as you, and over time began weighing the cost of fuel, time and equipment. I sold a clip a few times for 10 or 20 dollars and was excited. I have sense sold the exact same clip for 40 dollars regularly. There may be a market for 5 dollar clips, but there is also a market for 40 dollar, 100 dollar and even 500 dollar clips. In the end it is up to you, and what your goals are. You are never going to pay off your gear and time at your current plan.

I wish you the best my friend, and I hope that if someone offers you $4,000 for a $10,000 car, you say no.

I didn't know there was a search default value added, can you guys elaborate on that? Thanks. I've been gradually raising the prices on most of my clips.

I have read in forums posted by P5 staff, that clips search value are influenced by factors including a judgement of some kind by curation. I don't have the link to the post though, it was in something to do with the stars rating systems and how much value that adds to the default search.

This thread should be moved.

Friends do not waste your time talking to dtiberio. It's not worth your time. He reminds me of Mr. Fractals.

By the way, uploading the same clip multiple times may cause a member to be expelled from P5. I know it is prohibited in SS.

I added to several old threads trying to bury this one earlier. Yup, don't respond to this nonsense. It's argumentative with no basis.