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I think I’m going to close this thread now, and we can re-assess stuff at a later date if necessary.
The final consensus is:
$1.99, 800×800 small one time use
$(contributor set pricing), full size royalty free
We’ll set the pricing maximum and minimum somewhat reasonably so we don’t have highly fluctuating prices, but with enough room for contributors to price accordingly. We may also use pricing tiers so contributors choose one of them rather than setting a custom price so that customers have more consistent pricing to choose from. We’re also going to encourage contributors to leave the global pricing empty and let Symzio use the defaults, and mainly customize pricing on individual media as is necessary.
Hope this has been productive for everyone and thanks for participating. We’ll be releasing the updated version of Symbiostock shortly.
Although standardized pricing does have its perks, especially for corporate clients.
I suppose we’ll have to ponder it some more to make a good final decision. Perhaps we could have a narrow range of minimum and maximum pricing so it does not fluctuate wildly.
To some extent, we cannot control everything; the media is owned by contributors, and if contributors want to price their media at exorbitant prices and sell nothing, thereby causing Symzio to fail, then we kind of have to accept that this is the nature of reality. The only other option is to force them to price lower, in which case they’ll be unhappy and kind if make it fail anyways.
We have to hope that most contributors will be reasonable, and price things reasonably, and assist in marketing Symzio so that their reasonably priced media gets purchased.
At least, that’s where I’ve come to.
Good question.
I think that Redneck’s point about making contributors happy is a very relevant point, however. Although I’m comfortable with standard pricing, there may be a large variety of different contributors with different images, and allowing for variable pricing introduces a large array of different quality works to be included.
Further to this, our main drive with the standard pricing was to attract bloggers; as long as the small size is standardized, we basically lose nothing in that regard.
The real question is again, does having variable pricing for the full size hurt or benefit Symzio overall. I feel that more contributors will feel compelled to link to Symzio and push sales towards it if they are able to price their full size media. Inbound links from contributors is what is going to make or break the success, because that is the only feasible way to get organic search results from Google.
I’m not saying I’m gung-ho about it; standard pricing was definitely more attractive in my opinion, but variable pricing also has its perks in that it provides for more freedom.
One aspect that is good for me, for example, is I can produce longer videos now and price them higher. Some videos are 3 seconds long, and others are 2 minutes. It doesn’t make sense to price those the same.
What do you think?
You couldn’t have such RM images appear in the search results but push the buyer through to the contributor site could you? We then pay you a fee if they buy from us directly.
I think we could look into this in the future, but it would cause a break in the search results as it would be more prudent if customers expected to be able to complete their purchase right there. We’d have to examine how to implement something like this, but I don’t think we can do that right now.
I don’t think it’s a huge problem that contributors with great work that requires higher, personalized management be excluded from Symzio and maintained with an RM agency. I don’t think this will harm us competing with the big players and won’t make most contributors too unhappy.
Additionally, based on what experiences I’ve read about, you’re likely to get a LOT of customers coming to your independent site via your contributor profile page on Symzio. I’ve found that a lot of customers, when they find an artist they like, they tend to want to contact them personally and bookmark them, etc. So having media on your site that is NOT available on Symzio may actually be beneficial in the long term.
It seems Getty is specifically attaching RM to Editorial shots, just as Alamy seems to do, but that does not mean that editorial shots are by definition RM. Their legalese pretty clearly states that ‘all our editorial shots are within our RM collection’, or something along those lines.
But all in all, it appears pretty clear that editorial does not have to be RM, even though some of these agencies carry it as such.
123RF:
https://www.123rf.com/license.php?type=editorial
Clearly explicitly RF.
I think that Alamy (I’m assuming that’s where you’re referencing from) interchanges the terms RM and Editorial, when that is not actually accurate. RM is a licensing mechanism, whereas Editorial vs Commercial are use descriptors.
Does that alleviate some of your concern?
I think you’re wrong about that – I just read iStock, Canva and Shutterstock’s licensing and the only restriction they list is that it cannot be used in a commercial capacity. In fact, Shutterstock explicitly states that editorial images are assigned using a ‘Standard’ license, which is defined in their legalese.
So this won’t exclude any editorial media at all. The only restriction it implements is if you have some form of exclusivity with another agency in the form of RM or otherwise.
At the end I think buyers don’t even care about licenses. The buy an image and they use it as much as they like. So calling a license One-Time-Use, Extended or RF won’t make much of a difference for the customer. It’s actually only to cover OUR bases.
That’s probably true for some people, but for corporate clients it probably isn’t. I think Amazindesign is correct in that if design studios have a choice, they will lean away from any legal liability.
Additionally, with Symzio, since your contract is directly with the customer, you are able to access their e-mail address to contact them, so there is a lot more accountability. You will know who purchased your media (what a revolutionary notion).
I do sympathize with the fact that not all choices will work for everyone, but you certainly are not as microstock oriented as you are rights managed, and the major market leaders do not appear to be rights managed, and Symzio is aiming for that market. Hopefully it will work for you in a larger capacity than it was prior to the consensus on custom pricing, and perhaps that can grow over time.
You can sell editorial stuff as RF, can’t you?
All right, after discussing it internally and after taking everything into account, we think our original consensus is the best one:
$1.99, small, one time use
$(set by contributor), RF unlimited
I think that trying to accommodate RM media in the infrastructure while still competing directly with Shutterstock and Fotolia will be too difficult or confusing for customers.
For Steve and Redneck, the best option with regards to your RM media is to either remove it from Symzio for now, or hike the price up substantially for the RF Unlimited license. If the RM companies that are selling your media are doing so more profitably then it will be the best of both worlds to keep them excluded from Symzio.
In the end, we can’t diversify Symzio so much that its purpose gets blurred; it is a microstock platform. That’s where the hundreds of millions of dollars are being made.
All agreed?
Hey Amazindesign – yes, you are right, that is a good point. Some companies may purchase a vector to be used in multiple capacities and don’t want to have to buy multiple copies or keep track of the amount of times they have used it etc.
We won’t settle on the above structure yet until we come to a consensus on what is best overall. We definitely want to attract corporate clients with the Full, Extended licenses.
Yes, based on what Redneck originally said about the preference towards One Time Use, I was wondering if the RF Unlimited was the best way to go for the full size. We have to examine if we will lose customers if we only offer one time use for the full size, or if that doesn’t really matter. I don’t actually fully understand why RF is offered at all since, in most cases, when a customer purchases an image they are probably trying to use it for one use anyways. It’s almost a useless perk that current agencies are providing which doesn’t hurt them, but hurts us considerably.
However, we need to determine if we need to offer that. I’m leaning towards not. In which case we would follow the same idea, except contributors would set prices on the full size one time use. However, I do think that the full size, one time use should be an ‘extended’ license in the sense that they can use it in unlimited prints and in items for resale, as long as it is for that singular purpose with a singular end product.
We’ve discussed this internally now at length and have come to think that amazeindesign’s suggestion satisfies all grounds the best. This is what we are thinking:
1) Only one one-time-use license, set at $1.99 for an 800×800 image.
2) A full size, RF Unlimited license, at a price set by the contributor. The contributor will be able to set the global pricing in their Symzio Settings for all three media types (raster, video, vector) separately and then override this on a per image basis as well.
This will allow contributors to control the overall full size pricing of their media while still providing everyone the ability to market to bloggers for low cost one-time-use licenses.
Along with this, since videos do not get resized, we are going to remove the one-time-use licenses entirely from the videos and only have an RF Unlimited license.
For customers, this would be pretty appealing since they would gather that the variation in full size pricing is entirely based on the contributor, and we can also integrate filters in Symzio which allow customers to sort by price etc. And it definitely provides a more cohesive shopping experience since its only the full size media that will vary in pricing.
It also addresses Redneck’s notion about people buying the best image, regardless of price, for what fits – this will generally take place with full size images while the one time use license images will most likely be used more for blogs and what not where ‘anything relevant will do’.
Finally, it will also basically remove piracy completely from the equation and allow contributors to protect their intellectual property by controlling the price of the full size images and vectors – having no control over the price of their full images is something that has certainly hit a sore spot with the current global agency infrastructure.
What do you guys think?
The more I think about it, the more #1 makes sense – it covers Redneck’s concern about happy contributors because a large majority will be happy with the pricing since it is a result of the large majority’s average.
The flip side is we may miss out on some really great media from some really great contributors that need to price it higher, but if we adhere to their needs Symzio becomes a boutique shop and not a mass market shop. And in the future, once Symzio is getting steady sales, perhaps we can introduce a new ‘specialty tier’ just for these contributors that permits them to sell media at $50 and higher – perhaps offer one off purchases or something, or integrate the exclusive idea. There are actually a lot of options we can explore with regards to higher prices media, but it needs to be clearly separated from the main meat of Symzio’s library.
So how about we stick with #1 and decide on the pricing we want for the average contributor to be happy. Once that is settled and we are moving forward, we then decide how to implement a higher tiered system. Even I may have media that I don’t want to sell at average prices, and would like that option myself.