MicrostockGroup
Microstock Photography Forum - General => General Stock Discussion => Topic started by: stockman11 on June 02, 2020, 06:11
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More and more sites are implementing new subscription systems, especially Envato, Canva, Istock/Getty, in which RPD goes down drastically and sales volume goes up. Can we call this "nanostock"? And what do you think the future of nanostock or however-you-call-it is - is it necessarily bad or it can successfully replace microstock similarly like microstock replaced macrostock with lesser RPD but higher and steady earnings for most, despite some people being strongly against it when it was arriving?
I think it's not about RPD being as high as possible, I think it's about total earnings being as high as possible, and to achieve that we need optimal model and optimal prices. The question is where are that optimal prices and with what model? Is this new "nanostock" trend closer to optimal, or is it bellow optimal?
I'm not talking here about percentages which stock agencies get, that's the other subject. I'm talking purely about the trend of lower RPD and higher sales volume.
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It felt already nanostock before. Getty kicked it off and subs on SS are the vast majority of SS sales. And regarding the volumes: competition made it very difficult to get a momentum nowadays and bank on images selling hundreds or thousands of licenses.
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Total earning are obviously what we are after. The problem is that low RPDs always equals less earnings for us. The volume never comes close to compensating even in the medium term. If you are one of the first handful of people to sign up you may get a short lived windfall. Over time it has always been an absolute disaster. That is why we need to keep fighting for higher RPDs. The race to the bottom has nothing to do with us getting more money via volume and everything to do with agencies poaching the same customers from each other at our expense.
Agencies love the sub plans because they can get away with pocketing the monthly fees while we get peanuts or nothing at all (eg. via customer unused dls in SS's new model or IS returns so low they fall below threshold for payment).