Pond5 Trust Pilot Review

A recent review on Trustpilot reads :

You need to offer more discount codes

You need to offer more discount codes. Your prices are getting to be high.

I hope instead of just replying that the "contributors set their own price etc" I hope the response will be along the line of the fact that a certain amount of time, effort and expense is taken to produce stock footage and then we have a small amount of profit made on each purchase, the prices we set reflects that cost. It's time to educate the customer that what we do and the price that it is sold at is already reasonable here at Pond5 as video production is an expensive medium to produce. Just because it is a downloaded digital medium doesn't mean it all should be cheap as chips, real people are behind these productions with real cost's involved, it isn't a large automated production line and it isn't a piece of software that is sold millions of time over like your editing suite, it's a craft, we don't take 100% share of the royalties and we have to keep pace with ever evolving expensive technology to stay a head.

The so called industry standard for HD footage has been $79 for years, it is still the standard price at many sites and that means the price of stock in real terms has actually come down significantly. By supporting artists on Pond5 you are supporting a fairer deal for the contributor where royalty payouts for footage is 40% and 60%, by supporting sites that payout 15% you are really hurting the industry and the contributors as we will just have to move on and do something else.

I don't make a lot of money from stock footage anymore, other aggressively discounted stock sites make sure of that, and those sites won't be happy until they have completely milked that fact and then moved on to other lucrative schemes. The simple fact is the customer is getting a great deal from stock material already.

When DJI or Sony start giving away free camera equipment every month for everybody I will gladly give a few clips of mine away at discount.

For those that keep wanting more and more discounts... why not go out and shoot/create the stuff yourself for a change? Maybe then you will realize just how expensive it can be to produce content. That is all.

The people that keep asking for more discounts just want it free.
I had the opportunity to talk to someone that wanted cheaper videos and said he "couldn't wait for the next months free download"
I asked him how many videos did he actually buy.
He said none, I always go to each site to get the free videos and use them.