Currently I'm fighting with myself about going exclusive at istock.
For the last couple of month, istock constantly creates around 45% of my microstock revenue. Ignoring all other pros and cons, my major consideration is "bottom line" - money. Just entered the silver level, so its not enough to compensate the revenue of my other sites - unless I sell more at istock as an exclusive. So - how much more can I expect?
Given a certain level of image quality, more sales can be generated by better positioning in "best match". So my question was: how strong is the influence of the "exclusivity factor" for "best match".
So I did a little test. I tried to just look for the initial "push" of new images with 0 (zero) downloads. To avoid going through hundreds of pages I entered a search items that displayed just a couple of thousand matches -> "facade + entrance" -> 3825 matches found (just photos).
Here are the results: the first 0-DL image was at position 103 (exclusive). The first 0-DL image of a nonexclusive photographer was on position 459 (maybe I should feel privileged because it was one of mine...
). Between these two positions you can find another 101 exclusive 0-DL images (yes, I invested some time...).
So in this specific case before a buyer finds the first new nonexclusive 0-DL image, he was able to look at over 100 exclusive 0-DL images. No guarantee that they will sell better, but this REALLY is a big push for the start.
My conclusions: if this result is not purely coincidental, there is a good chance for more DL and money - and to compensate the missing revenue of my other sites.
Suggestions/remarks are welcome. Even better would be: specific feedback about that additional sales effect from somebody that went from nonexclusive to exclusive. Thank you very much!
Manfred (being on the verge of deleting my other ports....but still fighting with myself.....
)
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