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When Symbiostock started I noticed that most members used to price their images from $2.50 to $20.00 according to the size.
Now it seems like most new members price their stuff from $0.99 to $10.00.
Of course it’s totally up to you what you want to do with your work. Give it away for free if you like.
However, and this is just my personal opinion, if you’d like to make money there’s no need to start just another race to the bottom. I actually think trying to price your products as low as possible is counter productive. You’re basically devaluating your work and you’ll damage your own market in the long run. You’ll be competing against the same pricing standards that you started. There will always be someone else who thinks he needs to price a product lower than you do.What I think every photographer needs to understand is the fact you can’t really compare 99.99% of all images. Images are unique and that’s why the potential buyer will not consider the price of it being the first criteria of his decision. He will buy an image only if he likes it and if he thinks it will serve its purpose.
So don’t kill your own business! There’s no need for it.Again, just a personal observation and opinion. Not meant to be rude.
Good post – I had noticed that, and I had been moving in the opposite direction – making my unique images (that are only on my site plus Alamy and Corbis) priced up to $40 rather than $20. Haven’t sold one of those, but it is a relatively new change for me.
It would be great if we could work out a way of reaching a conclusion on whether price does make a difference, but I can’t think how to do that – all we have is anecdotal stuff!
Steve
I saw something new the other day – a single price for a single use (versus royalty free)
We have some sites experimenting with lower prices and some much higher. I think it’s not bad to have a range and for people to try things out to see what flies. If I had a bunch of simple isolated on white shots, I might make the prices of those much cheaper than of most of my portfolio (I have some, but not a ton, so for me, right now, everything’s priced the same).
At the moment, I don’t think any of us has the volume of buyers you’d need to test pricing the way big sites like amazon do. Even smaller sites – CanStock, for example – test pricing changes. I saw prices go up there and asked if contributor royalties would go up too. The reply was that it was just a test – some areas some of the time – so during the test royalties wouldn’t change.
My gut says that right now, getting noticed is more important than price (and that very low prices won’t get you noticed).
my thought was: i don’t understand anything of the licence-stuff and my sales are zero untill now.
so, why not make my own thing as an experiment that i understand and makes it very simple.
when sales are uphigh (once upon a time), i always can go up in pricing.Andre, one of your earlier posts on pricing encouraged me to bump my prices up a bit. I now have mine priced at $3, $6, $11 and $20. I’ve sold one image for $20 and it felt great to get a fair price for it.
I asked the same in that thread but never get answer…
So how is it? You pay for gear, for photo sessions, products, tickets (travel), model release (people), pay for program (like PS or LR), electric power during work, pay for knowledge, set up your Sys site (not for free), it’s all cost. Taking photos takes time, set up web site takes days, weeks, months (with SEO, etc). You have unique images and maybe exclusive on your site…
After all, do you think your work is worth only 1-2$ ?? 🙄 In royalty free licese?!
With full respect, but how can you, people, say you are professionals if giving your work for so low pricing (it is almost giving away for free)? It’s not another microstock with milions identical “tomato isolated”. You have valuable work for sale.
Wondering why our market is broken? Guess why…
If YOU don’t respect your work, why do you demand others (clients) to respect it?Just thinking… only asking.
Tell me I’m wrong…
@klsbear wrote:
Andre, one of your earlier posts on pricing encouraged me to bump my prices up a bit. I now have mine priced at $3, $6, $11 and $20. I’ve sold one image for $20 and it felt great to get a fair price for it.
My pricing goes like 5, 10, 20 and 50 and I have to admit that I have not sold a single image at the lowest price (smallest size). I’ve had an equal quantity of sales for 50 and 20 and I think only one or two sales for 10.
Try to keep prices up to make your images attractive and valuable.Who can value your images if not even the creator does?
@ariene wrote:
I asked the same in that thread but never get answer…
So how it is? You pay for gear, for photo sessions, products, tickets (travel), model release (people), pay for program (like PS or LR), electric power during work, pay for knowledge, set up your Sys site (not for free), it’s all cost. Taking photos takes time, set up web site takes days, weeks, months (with SEO, etc). You have unique images and maybe exclusive on your site…
After all, do you think you work is worth only 1-2$ ?? 🙄 In royalty free licese?!
With full respect, but how can you, people, say you are professionals if giving your work for so low pricing (it is almost giving away for free)? It’s not another microstock with milions identical “tomato isolated”. You have valuable work for sale.
Wondering why our market is broken? Guess why…
If YOU don’t respect your work, why do you demand others (clients) to respect it?Just thinking… only asking.
Tell me I’m wrong…
I completely agree with Ariene from all points of view. I sell my original format at 25 euros and I’m forced to start from 1 euro because my RF images I sell with many agencies and I want to keep my prices aligned in order to not go against my interests. But on my base site http://www.ezeepics.com I have many other photos I sell with Rights Managed licence, the rare photos or the photos where I worked hard….This is a very delicate problem because who get into this through stock agencies maybe doing other job and than started to do only photography is practically stucked. If doesn’t have other clients must go ahead with the agencies because his earnings are coming from the agencies. I’m not speaking about the photographer who has other clients. Is very hard to live only from photography and is very hard to discard the agencies when you start with them. I think that who is in this situation must have always the photos for agencies (low cost) and photos sold with Rights Managed Licence. In this way can be created a solid base of income monthly and, what is coming above from Rights Managed is just a plus. Because there are not other alternatives for a photographer who sells on web, at least that photographer doesn’t have other external clients.
The problem here is the clients hardly come to buy directly from artist. I think it doesn’t matter the price, big or small, it’s all about the quality of the photos. If a client comes to buy direct it’s only because he doesn’t find that picture in an agency and the picture is so good and fits very well his needs.
If a picture is sold with ten agencies the client will go and buy from one of them at 80% from the cases. Yes, maybe there are clients who will come to buy on the artist’s site but only if he finds that picture at the same price or a lower price. If the price it will be bigger than that one offered by the agencies for sure the artist site will be avoided. Other clients (generally big clients who buy large quantity of photos monthly) will never come to buy on a site which has max. 3000-4000 photos, they want to have enough choice and they will choose a subscription plan. The market is already destroyed by the agencies and will not come back in the golden times of macro. This is very sad but is true. It all depends by our income second my oppinion. If we want a solid constantly income we have to accept the market like it is. If we don’t live from photography or if we are a photographer with external contracts and clients than we can do what we want, sell wverything with Rights Managed licence and be happy with oly 100 dollars a month. But with 100$ a month is impossible to live and do this. Photography is a very expensive business.Several months ago, inspired by Redneck’s success in selling higher-priced images, I raised my own up to a max of $35 for the largest size. That is less than Redneck’s top price, but still significantly more than the $20 I started with last summer.
Now… since I haven’t had any sales yet, either before or after that increase, it’s hard to know if I’ve got my stuff overpriced or what. Most of my images are available on SS and DT, and last winter I stopped making the newest ones “exclusives” on my site. They are selling elsewhere now, mostly as subs.
However, $35 does feel like a “fair” price for a large, good-quality RF image, especially considering that I shoot most of my birds and critters with a super-expensive lens, that I have to travel to a wide variety of places to find those subjects (they aren’t all just hanging around my back door), and I shoot a lot to get just a few “keepers”… meaning I invest tons of time in culling, sorting, post-processing, etc.
To be honest, I’m happy to have a dedicated site of my own. Lots of people I know visit bestnaturestock.com and report back that they “loved” this or that image. Since I’m retired and don’t have to earn a living from this, I can be more sanguine about it.
So anyway, that’s my story, and I’m sticking with it! 😀
@redneck wrote:
@klsbear wrote:
Andre, one of your earlier posts on pricing encouraged me to bump my prices up a bit. I now have mine priced at $3, $6, $11 and $20. I’ve sold one image for $20 and it felt great to get a fair price for it.
My pricing goes like 5, 10, 20 and 50 and I have to admit that I have not sold a single image at the lowest price (smallest size). I’ve had an equal quantity of sales for 50 and 20 and I think only one or two sales for 10.
Try to keep prices up to make your images attractive and valuable.Who can value your images if not even the creator does?
The majority of my work is simple studio work and much of it was shot with my old 30D so they are smaller files. I shoot a lot of food, no models and it’s also on many of the other sites too. That’s some of my reasoning behind my pricing. I also researched several of the sites when I was setting things up and picked pricing that fell in the middle ranges at the time. I expect that I will price some exclusive work higher, especially if I do more complex set ups. I don’t disagree with the theory of valuing my work but given it’s current availability elsewhere I think it’s a fair compromise.
@marthamarks wrote:
Several months ago, inspired by Redneck’s success in selling higher-priced images, I raised my own up to a max of $35 for the largest size. That is less than Redneck’s top price, but still significantly more than the $20 I started with last summer.
If you are looking for real (!) inspiration, search for Westend 61 “image producer”, see their prices (everywhere) and how many images they sell. Amazing success in high pricing level! 😉
It’s not big difference here if you set up $ 1 or 2 or 5… If you want to feel changes, make it 10 or 20 or 50 … for start.
Besides, we never should compare with (pattern on) worse, only with better, right?@ariene wrote:
If you are looking for real (!) inspiration, search for Westend 61 “image producer”, see their prices (everywhere) and how many images they sell. Amazing success in high pricing level! 😉
Here’s my W61 profile: http://www.westend61.de/koala2/!andre.babiak .
But since W61 is more of a distributor than a direct seller the net proceeds are averaging lower than the ones from my own SYS site.Yes, I do believe that pricing our work higher gives a “vibe” of higher quality. I’d love to do that exclusively on my SYS site. However, for the 8 months or so that I withheld my newest images from the stock agencies, I had no sales for them. Once I bit the bullet and moved them into SS and DT, they began selling right away. It’s hard to be a purist.
I wasn’t aware of Westend 61, so thanks for letting me (and others) know about it.
Not sure it’s a good spot for my work, however, since I’m 100% focused on North America natural subjects. Do they need and/or welcome images like mine?
Also, it seems to be a supplier for many diverse stock agencies… which sounds a lot like the “partner programs” that cause so much aggravation at Veer, etc. Is Westend 61 somehow different from that model?
Martha, I think your images are great but might not be a good match for W61. They’re mostly interested in European lifestyle and travel images.
Personally I believe the number 1 reason why you haven’t had sales with your site yet is that your photography is covering a niche that’s only in demand with a low percentage of the entire stock client potential. Your work is great but there are just not as many people (in comparison to mainstream stock themes) who need it. But I’m sure the longer your images are listed and indexed with search engines the higher is the chance to attract people who are actually looking for it. I’d say keep up the great work and don’t get discouraged.
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