MicrostockGroup
Microstock Footage Forum => General - Stock Video => Topic started by: thirdbornentertainment on February 07, 2019, 12:56
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Remember when Pond5 had different pricing for 4k and 1080? Not anymore! They just cut the prices of more than half of our portfolios for 4k footage. This "test" which nobody was informed about is a brilliant way for them to help us make more money by giving our footage away. Told yall it was a race to the bottom. JFC.
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I just did some random searches and there are a ton of high priced 4k clips. Perhaps it is a test with only a subset of artists. None of my clips have suffered any price changes....yet anyway.
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Check your portfolio. Over half of my 1000 clips have been repriced. If they want to sell our footage for a cheap price then I am going to start mass producing low quality clips. And they said 10,000 clips in a year is impossible.
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That's incredibly disheartening if true. It should have been communicated to users first and they should be given an option to opt out.
I'm not a Pond 5 contributor but I thought one of their pitches was allowing contributors to set their own prices. Am I thinking of someone else?
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You are correct. They allow us to set our own prices but then introduced "Web pricing" as a way to undercut the competition. I love how they call this a test but our clips are all being sold at a massive discount. The only way to circumvent this is to manually adjust all of our prices....again. I seriously hope a new player emerges in the market that pays us what Shutterstock used to pay us. Eventually, people will be uploading their content via Instagram and the stock game will be over at that point.
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I don't want to sound like Gampa Old Timey (too late) but back in the day of film (stills and video) the agencies felt like agencies - you know - that repped talent and tried to get them the highest prices.
Then royalty free came along and cheap(er) automated gear, along with higher digital demand, and, as I'm sure any economist would say was obvious, for a large chunk of the market our work product (and we) became a commodity like soy beans.
I'm not surprised and am all for free markets but like you I suspect we need to make sure we price ourselves in a way that values our work.
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I've heard that before, the good ol days of stock footage. Now my 6 hours of work to produce one hyperlapse is worth $70 according to them. I have colleagues that would sell clips for $4000 + a decade ago if it was exclusive.
They want quickly produced garbage, that's what I'm about to give them. I just picked up a DJI pocket Osmo and will be shooting everything stupid little thing I can find just to saturate the market with the garbage they apparently want.
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We sold footage on a cost per second basis, with a 10 second minimum per cut, limited license (not royalty free).
Stills were sold based on usage. What is essentially a royalty free license today would almost be a buy out back then (no copyright transfer though) but the fee would be enough to turn you into royalty. :(
It sounds like you are a passionate creator. I hope you don't stop trying hard to produce great material simply to survive.
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Well, I've just checked my online files.
For sure something has happened: not only 4K but it seems that almost all my clips has been repriced to different levels, sometimes with just 0,50$ less than price I've set
What's... ???
Are they started a new model in which they judge the right price for every single clip?
I don't understand, really...
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This is crazy. So I have to constantly go back to check and manually change my prices?
The whole point of pond5 was the freedom for artists. That is why they often get content first and some artists only sell on pond5.
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Yes. Crazy. Hundred of my files have been priced down.....Mad >:(
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Here is a post from an admin on P5.
gregp5 2019-02-06 09:47
Hey guys,
As you've noticed, we are running a pricing test on 4K content with the goal of maximizing revenue for our Artists. This test effects a subset of 4K content on Pond5.
As we mentioned over the summer during our Web Resolution test, we feel it is our obligation to regularly test different ways to increase your earnings. We are, in fact, always testing something, be it price points, shopping cart features, homepage experience, etc. Some of these tests are more noticeable than others.
Our testing is always intensely methodical and designed not to cannibalize existing sales. At the same time, if we do not test, we cannot grow. We want to make recommendations to you based on data, not guesswork. This test is designed to zero in on the optimal price point for 4K, relative to HD (which is what most buyers purchase). The goal is to drive the most total revenue to you, the artist. We're very excited to see how it goes and, just like our last price test, will be sharing our findings with the community so that everyone can benefit.
For more info about the specific parameters of this test, please email us directly at [email protected]
Thanks!
They sure went about this the wrong way by forcing artists into the test without their permission. Moreover, once the test is done will Pond 5 reset the clips to their original prices? The post reads as if they are doing this to ultimately RECOMMEND to artists and not necessarily dictate. Wishe they would come in here to clarify.
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I changed all my prices back to normal. Wish they would provide a permanent opt out for their price experiments.
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Love how they keep repeating how this is going to mean more revenue for contributors. Do they really think people are that stupid? Maybe if they say it enough times in one email, it will come true. ???
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Love how they keep repeating how this is going to mean more revenue for contributors. Do they really think people are that stupid? Maybe if they say it enough times in one email, it will come true. ???
I am mostly constantly surprised by how little people on this group seem to understand marketing and economics. Costco sells for far less than their competition, but who makes the most money?
I had one of my first businesses back in the 1970's. I experimented with pricing, as any decent growing business will do. I sent out mailings (in those days, catalogs were sent by US Mail to potential consumers). Some with higher prices, some with lower prices. Some where some prices were higher but others lower, trying to determine the optimum price for different lines of products.
In my case, I discovered that if I dropped my prices by roughly 15% that my sales volume went up almost 30%, and I had more money in the bank at the end of each quarter (though I had to hire a couple extra people to handle the increased volume, which was of course, factored into the analysis).
OTOH, I had a photographic art print show in town recently (ended a month ago). I experimented there and had a few prints at a lower price. I had fully expected those would be the big sellers. To my surprise, my highest priced prints ($600) sold out, while my cheapest prints ($295) did not sell at all.
mmmm.... That still surprises me, but that is part of the point -- without testing, you will never know what the optimum price point is. Sometimes lowering a price will increase the volume enough to produce higher dollars in your pocket, sometimes not. When dealing with widgets that must be manufactured (or even prints that cost me money to make and frame) then you have to consider cost of production of each additional widget in the analysis. Where there is zero incremental cost in production though (as with digital media), then sometimes the per-unit price seems uncomfortably low.
Of course, you can always keep the price really, really high. That lets you gloat when you make one single sale. But then I would personally prefer selling at half that price if I can then sell it 10 times...
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Love how they keep repeating how this is going to mean more revenue for contributors. Do they really think people are that stupid? Maybe if they say it enough times in one email, it will come true. ???
I am mostly constantly surprised by how little people on this group seem to understand marketing and economics. Costco sells for far less than their competition, but who makes the most money?
I had one of my first businesses back in the 1970's. I experimented with pricing, as any decent growing business will do. I sent out mailings (in those days, catalogs were sent by US Mail to potential consumers). Some with higher prices, some with lower prices. Some where some prices were higher but others lower, trying to determine the optimum price for different lines of products.
In my case, I discovered that if I dropped my prices by roughly 15% that my sales volume went up almost 30%, and I had more money in the bank at the end of each quarter (though I had to hire a couple extra people to handle the increased volume, which was of course, factored into the analysis).
OTOH, I had a photographic art print show in town recently (ended a month ago). I experimented there and had a few prints at a lower price. I had fully expected those would be the big sellers. To my surprise, my highest priced prints ($600) sold out, while my cheapest prints ($295) did not sell at all.
mmmm.... That still surprises me, but that is part of the point -- without testing, you will never know what the optimum price point is. Sometimes lowering a price will increase the volume enough to produce higher dollars in your pocket, sometimes not. When dealing with widgets that must be manufactured (or even prints that cost me money to make and frame) then you have to consider cost of production of each additional widget in the analysis. Where there is zero incremental cost in production though (as with digital media), then sometimes the per-unit price seems uncomfortably low.
Of course, you can always keep the price really, really high. That lets you gloat when you make one single sale. But then I would personally prefer selling at half that price if I can then sell it 10 times...
Good points but they should recruit beta testers. Surprises are unnecessary and distract from content creation.
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I have files that are ultracheap and some that are expensive.
People make their own decisions and that is the way it should be.
If you want to offer all your files at a flat cheap rate...go ahead...nobody is stopping you.
There are many people on pond5 who do that.
And others set their prices really high and are fine with that.
But if you want ultracheap...just avoid pond5 and send them to getty to enjoy sales for 68 cents...
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Good points but they should recruit beta testers. Surprises are unnecessary and distract from content creation.
Yeah, well in the cases I noted, I was the creator, the marketer, the salesman, and in many cases the order fulfiller (until volume reached a level that I started hiring employees and things took off). I only had to convince my wife... which was not always as easy as it may seem at first... :)
When a company is selling someone else's product, and changes in price have immediate impact on the producer (us, in the case of stock media), that does not change the way market research works, but it does change the way it should be sold to the producers.
I am very definitely not saying the producers (Pond5 or any other agency I am aware of) does a particularly good job in communicating to the producers (us). However, I AM saying that the instant knee-jerk wailing and crying that goes on here with every new test makes it very clear that many here would benefit from a Marketing 101 class...
Along that vein, my first degree was a BS in engineering (UC Berkeley, 1972). I then started my first couple companies... and realized quickly that I had no idea how the heck business needed to be run to succeed. I took a couple of extension courses, where I learned the difference between cash flow and profit (those first couple years my accountant said I was making marvelous profits, but I couldn't pay my employees and honestly didn't know why!).
I went bankrupt in my first really serious company in 1980 (long story not particularly relevant here). Bummed out, when I became director of Engineering at Motorola in 1982, I had them pay for a MBA program. I thought I knew most of it, since I had already run a couple companies, but wow, did I learn a lot in that program. I was surprised, to say the least. With the bottom line being I went the next 35 years without another business failure, and am now happily (and very comfortably) retired.
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video will follow the same path as photo...already a saturated market with a competition to lower price. for me high end video are only those lifestyle or video who cost a lot of money with big production, those will always ask good price and make money, because is really difficult to copy or reproduce...hyperlapse time-lapse video of travel have zero entry barrier, everybody can buy an Cosmo and do those video and the quality will be enough for many buyers...a sony or gh4 with a handhold stabilizer can be had for 800 dollar used...everybody can study shoot and edit an hyperlpse in fast time, no rocket science. so for me it's clear that those video son will be ad for , one dollar like the photo or maximum 5 10. is only a matter of time and competition.
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No need for a marketing 101 class... we have already taken the BS101 class. Pond5 was marketed as a place to set your own prices. Period. Now they are changing that. It was affecting THEIR bottom line. As was mentioned already, contributors could always set their prices lower if they chose, in accordance with how the site worked. You are blaming contributors for being ignorant about marketing... that isn’t what the “wailing and crying” is about at all.
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Good points but they should recruit beta testers. Surprises are unnecessary and distract from content creation.
Yeah, well in the cases I noted, I was the creator, the marketer, the salesman, and in many cases the order fulfiller (until volume reached a level that I started hiring employees and things took off). I only had to convince my wife... which was not always as easy as it may seem at first... :)
When a company is selling someone else's product, and changes in price have immediate impact on the producer (us, in the case of stock media), that does not change the way market research works, but it does change the way it should be sold to the producers.
I am very definitely not saying the producers (Pond5 or any other agency I am aware of) does a particularly good job in communicating to the producers (us). However, I AM saying that the instant knee-jerk wailing and crying that goes on here with every new test makes it very clear that many here would benefit from a Marketing 101 class...
Along that vein, my first degree was a BS in engineering (UC Berkeley, 1972). I then started my first couple companies... and realized quickly that I had no idea how the heck business needed to be run to succeed. I took a couple of extension courses, where I learned the difference between cash flow and profit (those first couple years my accountant said I was making marvelous profits, but I couldn't pay my employees and honestly didn't know why!).
I went bankrupt in my first really serious company in 1980 (long story not particularly relevant here). Bummed out, when I became director of Engineering at Motorola in 1982, I had them pay for a MBA program. I thought I knew most of it, since I had already run a couple companies, but wow, did I learn a lot in that program. I was surprised, to say the least. With the bottom line being I went the next 35 years without another business failure, and am now happily (and very comfortably) retired.
I say SO WHAT? Your argument only holds water if P5, like costco, controlls pricing, which they don’t. You are missing the entire point. Pond5 is a SET YOUR OWN PRICE site. Not a controlled pricing site. Costco is a controlled pricing business. There is a big difference. So unless Pond 5 intends to dictate prices like most other sites do, there is no substance to your argument. And the way they snuck clips into this test without informing contributors is shameful. I am relatively certain there is some tiny clause in 5 point font point font in their terms that allows them to do this, but it is certainly came across as deceitful. Who is now responsible for resetting their prices back to the way they were when the test is completed? And all of this testing is for what? To merely “recommend” a price pojnt to us? They do that today and I ignore that. And I do fine on P5. They could have very well asked for volunteers but they chose to nab n grab.
In the end, your position is only substantitive if P5 is moving towards forcing fixed pricing on contributors.
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Love how they keep repeating how this is going to mean more revenue for contributors. Do they really think people are that stupid? Maybe if they say it enough times in one email, it will come true. ???
Couldn't have said that better myself.
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I changed all my prices back as they were before they started to mess with them and let them know in message that I'm not allowing them to change my prices without my knowledge anymore, as they are "set your own price" site, and if they change their terms of use about that they should let us know before doing anything with our prices.
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Sometimes, my clips are sold higher than my asking price.
Is it an EL sale?
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If that's true, they just can't change the price without asking contributors first. That's totally unacceptable and rude.
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Pond5 is a SET YOUR OWN PRICE site. Not a controlled pricing site. Costco is a controlled pricing business. There is a big difference. So unless Pond 5 intends to dictate prices like most other sites do, there is no substance to your argument. And the way they snuck clips into this test without informing contributors is shameful. I am relatively certain there is some tiny clause in 5 point font point font in their terms that allows them to do this, but it is certainly came across as deceitful. Who is now responsible for resetting their prices back to the way they were when the test is completed? And all of this testing is for what? To merely “recommend” a price pojnt to us? They do that today and I ignore that. And I do fine on P5. They could have very well asked for volunteers but they chose to nab n grab.
In the end, your position is only substantitive if P5 is moving towards forcing fixed pricing on contributors.
I have never set my own price there, and just let it go with their standards. As such, I don't feel as maligned as someone might who specified a price and had it then changed on them.
I do agree that doesn't seem like something they should be able to do without consulting with the provider...
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I just checked it and OMG it's true! However, I just let them test it because it's February, a slow month and the clips priced the lowest are the ones that didn't sell much.
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I reset all mine because they were all random amounts... $97.5, $113.5, $102.5. I also sent an email.
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Just checked and a bunch of my 4K footage was repriced to several different levels. Not happy about Pond 5 changing prices without asking. I changed all of my prices back.
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Ditto. I have had footage prices change. It's not right. Has there been any communication from P5 on this?
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Bit late to the party, but just checked and they've repriced a good portion of my clips.
After glancing through this thread, I thought it was just the non sellers they're knocking down, but I went to check and two of my best selling clips had their prices halved. Many others with good sales also got hit with varying price reductions.
There's no way this is an intelligent repricing, it's totally random.
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Could this just be some confusion about the web pricing option?
The new lower priced web option is for 720 files. A client who buys this gets the reduced price but gets the 720 file (not 4k or 1080)
Also you can set the price for the web files. If you object to the lower price you could set it to the 1080 price or even the 4k,.
All of my footage seems to be at the price I set it but, of course, I can't say for others.
I have had a fair number of web priced sales and they don't seem to be cutting into 4k or 1080 sales. Difficult to know for sure but so far I am happy with it.
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Just changed all my 4K pricing back to where it was and sent an angry email to Pond5. One of their key features for contributors is allowing us to set our own prices. To violate that and not even seek permission for the pricing test is a serious breach of trust. They need to hear from contributors that that's crossing the line, they must always seek permission before changing prices. I encourage others to email them as well so they don't continue to do this. [email protected]
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Here is the response I got from Pond5: "This particular test will run for 8 weeks and the prices will be set back to their original amount when it's finished. What we learn with the test it will help us to make better recommendations to our artists about the optimal price of 4K content to help them to make the most revenue. We appreciate your cooperation and we're here to solve any questions that you may have."
And the response I sent to them: "Cristobal, that was a tone-deaf response that ignored the key point here - Pond5 should not be changing prices, even as a test for a couple months, without informing contributors and getting their permission. It is a violation of a core element in the contributor relationship, namely contributors having control over their own pricing. Pond5 should have contacted contributors about the test and asked them to either opt in or opt out. I read almost everything stock sites send to me for contributor communications, and I did not see any communication about this at all, much less an opt in/out element. What I want to hear from Pond5 is: 1) they recognize that setting prices is a key prerogative for contributors; 2) they admit communication here was extremely poorly handled; 3) they make a commitment that in the future they will not change prices, even as a test, without consent from contributors. Please make these points known to the decision makers at Pond5."
I do read almost everything the stock sites email, and I didn't see anything about a 4K pricing test. Did anyone receive advance notification of this? Were you allowed to opt out?
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Whatever they are doing isn't working anyway. Pond5 is getting crushed by Shutterstock on my end.
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I do think Pond5 sales are dipping overall, and my stats during these first two months of the year seem to suggest that.
Last month, SS beat P5, something that only has happened once before (coincidentally, also in January of the previous year), and it looks like it will happen again this month unless things really pick up on P5 the second half of the month.
I suspect P5 sees this, too, which may be why their doing the 4K price experiment (which I don't think I'm a part of).
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Pond5 crushed SS for me last month!
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I dunno if this is relevant, but speaking for Pond5
I always change price from default 25 to 59 same as AS & SS price my fullHD files
trying to have a +/- 1 or 2 euros price difference between agencies and not half priced in P5.
Last time I checked, price was set to 59 and appeared as 59.
Checking last uploads, price is set to 59 but displayed as 55 in selling page.
Similar for older clips, set to 59 but showing 55 in page with 22 price for web option.