MicrostockGroup
Agency Based Discussion => New Sites - General => Topic started by: Anja02 on September 21, 2014, 15:52
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There are always new sites promoting their agencies here, enticing us to join. But they often leave out the most important thing - show me the money, guys - or the potential, at least.
For example, if you were to invest in a new company, there are some basic business ratios that would be used to assess whether an investment has potential. Translating that into microstock terms, uploading my images to your site is an investment of my assets, time and potential erosion of sales to other sites, so I would need to make sure that there is compensation.
One business ratio that immediately comes to mind is Assets-to-Customer Base, which would tell me how much competition there is for sales on your site. For example, in their last published annual report, SS stated they had 900,000 active users. Currently they have 42,200,000 images. If we assume that they still have the same number of buyers, then their Assets-to-Customer Base would be 46.9. As they are the best performers at this stage, this can be the base ratio to compare to other agencies - if we can obtain that data.
So, New Sites, can you tell us how your agency compares to say, SS? Is your data transparent enough to provide us with this data? Do you know these figures?
Ratio analysis, of course, is only valuable where there is some type of useful comparison. For example, year to year within a company, or agency to agency. Perhaps, as a microstock photographers community, we can collect that information and store it for comparison between agencies. That would be most valuable, in my mind.
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I just wish new agencies stop compete with pricing. This is getting us to nowhere.
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The only real advantage to a new agency is a higher cut. Some guy throwing together some php and creating a stock site and asking more than 50% of MY sales is a bit much. But, without your own marketing plan, hoping and waiting is a farce wherever you go.
You have to pick an agency and market your own stuff leveraging their "reach" its the only real way to go forward for micro contributors.