understanding pricing...?

"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 http://www.stockvideoseller.com/public_html/topics/pricing-stock-footage-to-se.html. 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...