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I have decided that I am going to switch all my licensing and pricing over to an RM, one-time-use platform. My reasons for doing so are as follows:
1) The agencies are already monopolizing the RF market, and do so through high priced ‘membership’ or ‘bundle’ packages. All in all, it costs the average buyer at least $40 to get started, even if they only want one image. In my opinion, this opens a gap in the market.
2) By licensing everything under a one time use license, I retain more control over where and how my media is used. I am uncomfortable in general with RF licensing, and moreso when I am getting paid $0.33 a sale for it.
3) By limiting the licensing to one project, I can validate charging less than agencies for one off purchases. It also makes it more likely that customers will be willing to adhere to the licensing terms and purchase more licenses if they needed to.
4) Like all modern media pricing, it makes piracy less pronounced since the cost of acquisition is so low. This is how the music industry battled piracy, and how the movie industry is also succeeding in doing so.
My target customer is mostly the online blogger, reporter, writer. There are millions of professional blogs and news outlets, and they all repeatedly, always need new media for their work. By providing nominally priced media at one-off costs, it makes it easier and attractive for the average purchaser to invest in it, even if they have a membership or credits with an agency.
Therefore, I am pricing my media as follows:
$0.99 for a one time use maximum 600×600 image.
$4.99 for a one time use full size image.
$24.99 for an extended one time use full size image.
Your pricing, of course, will vary depending on your niche and what not.
I have changed my licensing page to reflect what one-time-use and extended licenses mean:
http://www.enlightenedmedia.com/licensing/
As you can see, the primary differences are unlimited seats and resale – with the extended license you can make unlimited reproductions and use it in items for resale. However, with both licenses, it is still only permitted in one project.
It still baffles me that an organization can purchase a full sized image from me through agencies for $0.25 and keep it to use as much as they want in as many different projects as they want in perpetuity. I have no interest in trying to alter or change that dynamic, because it is what it is.
I do, however, believe that there is potentially a large market of customers who would be happy to purchase an image for a dollar for use in their facebook ad, or in their profiles, or in their blog. I, myself, have often looked for free images online and found them to be poor quality, and not quite what I was looking for. I would happily have spent a dollar for it. I believe others will too.
Our initial goal with our independent sites is to see a noticeable increase in our revenue through independent sales. I believe this is the correct direction to go in achieving it. I recommend you consider switching to a one-time-use license so we present customers a more cohesive pricing and licensing system so it begins to brand independent Symbiostock sites as the place to go for great images at even better one-off pricing.
I’ve always offered a “one-project-license” which basically means the client can use the image multiple times within one project (like a book, a website, a flyer etc)
That’s fantastic to know. As far as I know, that differs from Royalty-Free which allows you to use it unlimited projects. Thanks for the feedback. I’m much more geared towards this model for my independent site.
very good point, @robin. (Why haven’t I been thinking of something like this myself?!) Because that loss-of-control aspect — particularly at those .35-and-below pricing levels left right and centre — has been bothering me for some time, too.
AP/V camera guy; view this, if you're a drone video nerd, too..
Hi Robin
I changed my pricing and licensing to the same approach when I originally read this, but so far, no sales…
Are you having any better luck?
Steve
I have gotten a few blogger and one full size purchases, no extended. I think I understood that running sites independently would be tough, but based on my own experiences, marketing one’s own site takes a long time and it would be better if we all marketed one central site to make our efforts cumulative.
I really am impressed with a lot of the Symbiostock sites that are going up, and despite the amount of effort everyone is putting in, it is difficult to bring in customers for every small niche.
That’s why we are spending all our time developing Symzio. A fully functional independently run agency that ties all Symbiostock sites together was the original plan when I first got involved in this, and I rightly believed that it was needed for this to work.
The good news is it’s coming along really well. We will be launching an extended beta initially. Additionally, I am investigating the possibility of developing and releasing premium addons to Symbiostock in the form of the stock submitter and the video module. The video module will require custom server configuration, but if I can create a standalone plugin that works with Symbiostock, at least people have the option of that.
Nothing is written in stone regarding those two because I don’t even know if it’s technically possible, but I’m looking into it. If standalone users can use Symbiostock to also distribute their images to agencies, run their independent site, and manage their images within Symzio, it will provide an all-in-one solution that has many methods of monetization. All in all, I’m working very hard to make sure that you guys are able to make the most money you can out of your images with the least amount of headache.
The one thing I am going to be doing, however, once Symzio is live, is heavy marketing, and I’m going to implore everyone else to market it with me. We don’t have the financial means of paying for mass advertising, so we’re going to have to work as a group to make it really find the customers. This will be a far more fulfilling effort than it must be for each individual contributor to try to market their own site independently.
Symzio is very promising. Thanks symbiostock team for your effort. It’s very hard to promote your own website by yourself. I tried to advertise in social media and spend money on it but still I got zero result. I agree for what you said “marketing one’s own site takes a long time and it would be better if we all marketed one central site to make our efforts cumulative”
Great to know, Robin. Any ideas prior to the launch of the new Symzio about how we can collectively market? I’ve continued to add images to my site (5800 now) and I’m putting more editorial shots that are only on more expensive RM sites like Alamy and Corbis so I’m not competing with my own shots on the microstock sites.
I blog about my site, but I haven’t done much more broadly. I think I could get a guest blog on Rick Sammon’s site if we have a common message to plug about our group approach. Perhaps wait until the new Symzio is ready?
Steve
I think it’s a fantastic idea to brainstorm in the meantime. We can market it before it’s ready, but I don’t see too much benefit in that because it is going to be a lot more sticky once you see live images showing up.
Here are a few of things I’ve already got planned:
1) I’m going to add a search form on Symbiostock.org that populates every page that will let people search Symzio.
2) I’m going to create a thread every single day in the Symzio forum that will be titled ‘November 2nd, 2015: What have you done to promote Symzio today?’. It will reflect the date every day and I’m going to press everyone to put their marketing activities there. For example, if you blogged about Symzio, you link to your blog. If you liked a Symzio FB post, put it there. I’m going to do it every single day and hope that everyone gets inspired by my efforts to join in.
3) I’m going to post member images and link to them every day on facebook, twitter, pinterest and google plus. I already have all the pages reserved.
4) I’m going to create an account on different forums where it is permitted and openly introduce Symzio to people and remain active, linking to Symzio in my signature.
5) I created a free service years ago that I’m going to start using religiously:
It’s really good because you add tasks that you want to do every day, and every day you check them off. Very useful to keep track of things easily. For example, I’m going to add ‘Place member image on Facebook post’ as a task. I figure every day, I’ll dedicate an hour or so to promoting Symzio through these mechanisms, then try to promote it in other ways the rest of the time.
6) Paid advertising – I’m going to scavenger the net for all the places SS, Adobe Stock and Dreamstime and such advertise and try to follow on their coat tails. Obviously I don’t have a large budget but any money I get from Symbiostock or Symzio will go into it.
I have a great deal of faith in Symzio and always believed it is the key to this whole effort, but it is highly dependent on a community of contributors that are as aggressive as I am in marketing it. Everyone needs to use social media to promote it regularly as if it is their own personal website.
There are going to be members that don’t do anything and just want to benefit from our work, and it really does not matter to me because in the long run, only those that are willing to work hard for a better situation will really, actually benefit from it. You’ve been very supportive from the get-go Steve, and I feel an obligation to try my best to help you monetize your work. It’s this sort of camaraderie we want to create so that everyone works tirelessly for the collective good.
If you have any other marketing ideas or suggestions, share them. In my mind, at a base level, all members should use social media and any blogs they contribute to to promote it. This, in addition to adding their Symzio portfolio to their signatures (once it’s live, obviously).
Great ideas – I just tweeted the first of my “holiday snaps” from Spain that are now on my symbiostock site under the tag #symbiostock
Sounds like you’re going to be a very busy man Robin,
I only wish I could devote as much time to the project but some of us can only do little by little but nevertheless hopefully every little helps. Reading this has made me realise you have a genuine belief and dedication to make this work and hopefully for all participants it will. It has also infused me to want to help the process along and do my bit or at least as much as I practically can do in more ways than I presently am. I think we all need to start thinking along the same lines, it’s a numbers game and the more of us on-board and dedicated with a vast library of images from different niches to publicise who knows where it can go with the help of Symzio and your tireless effort.
You are right Antony – every little helps. The key is, as I said, everyone jointly doing their part to market it whenever they can. A link here, a post there, a like here, a tweet there. Every single one matters and tells the big search engines that Symzio matters. The more it matters, the higher every image will show up, the more sales everyone will get. Doing it alone will be very difficult.
The one thing that I keep in mind is that industry altering things do happen, and they can start small. We’re talking about this in this forum, and who knows, months from now we could be really starting to see daily sales through Symzio and our independent sites that makes it a real contender in the grand scheme of things.
And if and when Symzio takes off, it will be permanent; there is so much instability in the industry nowadays, but it is because one huge company comes, advertises, gets clients and milks them, then another one comes and does the same thing. Symzio will be the first aggregate to provide stability to both customers and contributors.
I sincerely believe that if most contributors think and feel the same way everyone in this thread does, and does their part to promote it, there is no way it can’t take off. But it is dependent on every person taking the initiative.
We’re spending a lot of time ensuring Symzio looks really nice and is easy to use. I want the customer experience to blow away the competition with ease and simplicity so that all our marketing efforts work with a site that is extremely sticky.
The one thing that I keep in mind is that industry altering things do happen, and they can start small. We’re talking about this in this forum, and who knows, months from now we could be really starting to see daily sales through Symzio and our independent sites that makes it a real contender in the grand scheme of things.
Completely agree with what you are saying here, it could be comparable to a tiny seed which germinates and grows into a huge tree, from such humble and miniscule beginnings things of gigantic proportions can be produced which far outweigh their simple origins. Let’s hope this is the case and we should work with that goal in mind.
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