Should I Get A 4K Camera Or 1080p?

Pond5 is training the customer to expect any file, irrespective of quality or investment in the shoot, to be bought for 8 dollars.

At the same time they say they want higher quality files.

If they raised hd to 60 dollars and 4k to a minimum of 150 and abolished the membership program, I could understand what they are doing.

Right now I don´t.

Everybody has their own strategy, you can price your ducks at 300 dollars, I´ll continue to set mine at 10, unless it involved models and I invested into it.

This is a free pricing marketplace, you have your customers I´ll have mine. No need to be afraid of me.

It is pond5 that is creating a new floor of 8 dollars for all file types. And again, if it works for them and their artists, they should do it.

But there is no question that they have quite drastically changed the direction they are taking. And of course they can do with their company whatever they want. It is their investment money, not ours.

Can you do the math? 5 million (in marketplace) vs 20,000 (membership plan) files?

They are just starting out. Do you seriously think it will stay that way if the customers like it?

Also they are over 400 000 thousand files (200k video, 200k photos, 15k audio)

https://www.pond5.com/membership

And if the customer does a search for membership only content, everyone else becomes invisible.

Pond5 will not stay that way. Not to expand or change means death. That is why P5 change. Simple..

Back to the topic:
First law in every business is to know what you want, all other is worthless and has no future. So i would answer: "Save every penny as you can!" ;)

@Pat:
You forgot, discussing with people who sell clips for $10 or else is senseless. If somebody lives in India, Pakistan or else and sells for $10, ok, this are not Peanuts for him and we may accept this mind.
If somebody lives in Europe, USA or any other similar cultural civilisation and sells his clips for Peanuts, ......LOL.... encourage him to offer it for free. His whole life seems to be only a testshot. ;)

{derisive mode off}

She lives in Köln in India country !! ;-)

Back off topic :

Question for jcobalt should you be willing to share some stats , I see you do have a lot of good clips priced at $10 and $20, are you getting massive sales volumes with those prices? Seems to be the only way you would be making good profit would be to have tons of daily sales at those low prices.

In my case I raised prices to their current levels and I did that last October and my sales and revenue went up big time from October last year to the beginning of March this year when all the P5 sales and technical problems hit but aside from that it was a good run, much better than expected. I used to be in the $40-$60 range and it was a road to bankruptcy, the sales volume was just not there, raised prices and sales and revenue went up. To be honest I wasn't expecting that to happen but I was pleasantly surprised.

@ WeatherNews

That I comment before to her already, she can't expect hundred downloads of clip like $1 download/photo. It is just not going to happen in video selling. Not possible... She obviously can't see this. So she is bad self-claimed educator/coach etc.

I think your customer are buying your membership footage instead from marketplace. Be careful.. You soon will know after sale report comes out.

I started pricing test shots and outtakes at low levels last year. It brought me several serial downloads, i.e. People taking more than one file, but interestingly it increased the sales of the more expensive clips from the series.

So overall volume of sales on all price categories went up, after grouping my files by quality and price.

At least, until a few weeks ago, now everything is dead, I think this was because galleries were hidden for a while and it is still extremly difficult to get an overview of the artists portfolio.

But for me taking a hard look at the files and pricing by quality worked.

I do not "intentionally" produce 10 dollar clips. But I am practising a lot with different settings, different scenes, lighting etc...there is no reason to throw outtakes away if they can make reliable money. They serve a purpose but it is not the intention to sell them thousands of times. They are testshots, not bestsellers.

If something sells on SS or elsewhere with higher prices, I raise the price here, if something doesn't sell anywhere, I gradually drop the price.

It's a dynamic system and it was working really well for me until this year everything was changed.

If pond5 raises the base price of hd to 60 and 4k to 150, I 'll send the testshots elsewhere. But as long as they operate as a real marketplace, I will take advantage of having content in all available price bands.

This way some of my files will always be visible and the customer cannot cut me out when they use the price slider.

If they open the membership club to all artists, I will offer files that are close to the 8 dollar price tag they are establishing.But I don't think it makes sense to offer 100 dollar files for 8 dollars.

There is still no oversupply in video, the market is at an extremly early stage. No doubt one day people will upload 1 million videos a week, the way it is with photos, but that is still many years off.

And 4k is a desert, there is nothing there, everything is missing.

Eta: I am also still at an early stage of my portfolio. It is amazing what sells and what doesn't. So there is a lot to learn, but I'll get there. Questions like how do I best combine photo and video shootings? How much should I invest in actors or models? What is the best way to move the camera for a given scene? Which genre gives the best reliable, longterm income? Which niche can I supply best? Every Genre has their own trends and their own visual language, just like in photography. I think it will take me 2000 files before I can decipher my own little puzzle.

But everything in video is still open, there is very little competition, that is the beauty of it. In many ways it is a very easy market.

Im not sure I completely understand your response but if I am understanding it correctly you are asking why people think they can't get 300-400 dollar from ducks in a pond. The reason is simple, everyone can take a video of a duck in a pond. Unless you have something very specific and unique you are likely not to sell very many of these types of videos. To really have a chance, you have to sell them cheap or get lucky.