You're welcome, from those of us that pushed for this change that is going to increase your earnings against your apparent wishes. To some of us, this isn't just a hobby anymore. So try to understand how the resistance to fair pricing, supporting the companies bringing this whole industry down, and then making sarcastic cracks when a great company does something smart for everyone's benefit, try to understand how that comes off and why it might be aggravating to those of us who depend on this kind of income to pays bills.

Spacestock.... I'm one of the top 5 video selling artists in the world and trust me, you're on the wrong road if you think that stock economics works the way you think it does.  Come back here in three months and tell us how unhappy you are with your earnings at P5.

Fair enough and I understand your concern.  I was part of the iStock group who were invited into the Vetta photos and video early on.  We were sceptical then too.  We saw our earnings increase virtually overnight.  Vetta pricing was vastly more than we had been paid previously and yet customers were happy to pay.  HD clips for $100's not $25.

$25 for a clip of a duck or clouds is good value.  $50 for a shot of time lapse traffic is good value. $100 for a shot of a good looking model on a location wearing great clothes, make up artist, art direction prepared 5 days in advance, lighting, camera, travel, expenses, insurance etc...... is * good value.

Now wake up and realise that you are an artist. Behave like an artist and understand that like all artists you can earn good money for your art and still it's GOOD VALUE to corporate producers, web sites, music video editors, etc.

$10 clips will drag us into the dust.  Have respect for the artistic community. Respect yourself and stop selling yourself and us short!  We are not point and shoot idiots. We are professionals now breathe deep and act like one too.

Maybe the concept is:

Customers that looked only at the pricing, and went for lower quality clips just because they were priced low, now that are enforced to spend almost the same for different quality level clips would (should? could? ) prefer to choose higher qulity ones.

So if I'm a contributor with low quality port I will see my sales going down, while if I have high quality clips priced accordingly my sales will increase.

This in an ideal world....we'll see in the real one.

OK, that kind of makes sense. If Ronald started charging $50 for his burgers, then the Michelin restaurant next door wouldn't seem like that much extra for the higher quality. I'll go with that.

Exactly. You managed to explain it with much less words. 

I see a lot of people with expensive equipment here willing to sell brilliant hi-end clips for quite a high price to pay for their equipment. I'm not the one who is selling my average to poor quality HDs for $10, but I'd definetely experiment with something close to it since I'm supporting the "garbage company", Envato. I'm quite new there but a lot of people I know have Envato (mostly Videohive) as the second or the third biggest earner for them. Are they crazy? I doubt that. Do they make good money with video stock in total for years? Definitely yes, especially if you consider poor average salary in Russia and Ukraine. I really don't care if Sora photography would afford their next Phantom Flex 4K with plenty of cheap worse clips on stock sites (mine too) made with cameras of 1/100 of it's price. All I know is that they all sell, Sora's much better I guess. And this is a real great free market with everybody free to set their own prices. Isn't it fair enough to set price VERY differently for same stuff shot with Phantom and Sony RX? It's every person's right to choose the pricing if it's allowed and even if somebody would give his or her clips for free it's still their right. All those minimum level adjustments seem to me as unnatural as sunset supervisor job, it all just works fine by itself.

Hold on... I've just thought of something. If somebody is selling stuff on Pond for $10, then I'm sure the general consensus would be that they should increase their prices. And based on what people are saying here, and in a bunch of other threads, they'd make more money if they did so.

And they will increase their prices, to $25, because they have to. Maybe more, but if they were selling at $10 before then the $25 minimum is more likely.

But... what you're saying is that if there's less of a difference between this guy's stuff and my stuff, people are more likely to buy my stuff. So, as a result, this guy isn't actually going to earn more, he's going to earn less. And if this less of a difference thing works across the board, then if I put my prices up, then there will be less of a difference between my stuff and more expensive stuff... so I'll also make less, as people will be more likely to go for the more expensive stuff.

It seems slightly contradictory. Sure, I get that my stuff needs to be better than his to warrant the higher price, but the general 'put your prices up and value your work' advice seems to be dished out to everybody without taking quality into account. I'm sure nobody on the microburgergroup.com forums are telling Ronald and Hamburgler that they should be charging $10 for a beefburger.

The thing is, making stock isn't exactly rocket science, and I just feel that a lot of people put maybe a bit too much value on their work. Yes, we hear anecdotes of how people sell clips at $250 and buyers are more than happy to pay it so everything's wonderful... but who's to say that 10 sales at $250 couldn't be 100 sales at $50 or even 1000 sales at $5?

I think pricing is a bit if a dark art and there's no perfect one size fits all formula. You've got content, duration, the site you're selling it on, quality, usability, amount of similar clips you're competing with etc etc. Some clips just aren't worth $25. Some are worth more than $250.

I feel that some people are influenced a bit too much by what they feel the price should be, no matter the clip, rather than the potential value of the lifetime sales of the clip. I have a clip at Videohive that has made me $1370 over 15 months. I've probably doubled that with sales from other sites. It took me about six hours and $250 to create (I had to hire a dude to help with something I was stuck on). Am I not valuing my work if I'm earning over $450 per hour for those six hours I put in? And that's for just over a year... I'm sure I'll at least double that for the lifetime of the clip sales. It's actually three different clips where I've just changed the colours on the other two... work smart, not hard! You could say that a lot of clips just don't have that sales potential. To that, I'd say... well they're obviously not good enough. Make better stuff!

So yeah, I'm just rambling a bit now, thinking out loud.

Do you have files in the membership collection?

Or does your disdain for low prices exclude subscriptions?

I think it would be very interesting if one of the chosen few would release their download numbers or income and compare that to their regular sales of 200 dollar files.

Then we could all see if low prices with ultra high volume would make sense or not.

Pond5 is like a department store - some items are very superior and SHOULD cost more (Calvin Klein perfume) and some are not-so-superior (Vanilla Fields) and are priced lower.

I do recognize when a video is so well done it deserves a $250 price. Cheers to the brilliant work. We are all working this microstock beast together ...

I am a "bottom feeder" according to you because 5 or so clips are priced below $25. I will be happy to report back to you the tremendous increase in the coming months...

Keeping to a sensible minimum ($25 seems like an affordable rate) then all the clips from low to high quality stay reasonably buoyant.  If you bring the 'bottom feeder' clips down too low ($10 for instance) then the gap from reasonable quality pricing to low is increased.

It drags down all pricing.

After a spell of people dropping prices to compromise, what will be the new low, $5?

What will be the new high, $20?

I think what we all worry about is that race to the bottom.  Spacestock, you don't want to protect against that?

I think what might be going on here is that one persons idea of a low fee is another's high.  It also depends how much you're earning and which part of the world you're from.  $25 to someone might seem like a fortune and to another just pocket change.

There is no obvious $number for lowest priced clips but we've been in this business long enough to know that you are shooting yourself in the wallet by going too low.

I've experimented for 8 years on Pond 5 and my findings tell me it's better to go $25 and not $10.  If you just give customers a $25 option then that's what they'll buy.  If you give them a $10 option on another site then that's where they'll buy it from.   Just remove that $10 option.  What are they going to do? Stop buying clips?  No... of course not.

Make sense?

Actually, my impression is the exact opposite, lots of hobbyists  totally overpricing their clips.

If you offer quality files for high prices customers will understand, but the endless sunsets, holiday snapshots and pet videos for 200 dollars?

A pro can distinguish what is high and low quality from his output and price accordingly.

Also pond5 does not offer the customer the option to buy a smaller, web resolution file for less than dollars like other agencies do.

I do this for a living, to be able to work different levels and markets is crucial if you do stock full time.

There is no "one price is right for everyone" solution. Just like there isn't just one stock picture or video for a situation.

I am always interested in real data, though.

So I would love to see numbers from the membership sales.

How many files are being sold hundreds of times a month at 6-8 dollars?