Hello Everyone

I thought I would drop you all a quick email to give you a bit of insight as to what is going on in our new World. Today is an historic day, not just for us, but for the stock content industry as a whole.

We have launched the first new pricing model for more than a generation. Say hello to bidder, the brand new revolution in stock content pricing.

The simple premise behind bidder is that we don't all always agree on what is fair value. Now, if a client feels an image is worth less that we have pre-priced it, they can do something about it - bid. We will either accept their bid, or counter it. Anyway, take a look yourself: it's easy to use and frankly quite addictive too.

Think change. Think bidder.

What have credits ever done for you?
In conjunction with this launch of bidder we have decided to kill off credits.

At Pocketstock, credits have expired - for good.


We had a long think about credits and tried hard understand the logic behind them. You know what, we still don't get what it is. Credits were introduced by iStock when images were being exchanged amongst the community - not sold. This exchange concept died a very quick death, unfortunately, credits didn't.

To find out if there was any compelling reason for keeping them, we spoke to a number of suppliers and clients and the general consensus vied between, "they are there because they are" at the very best and "they suck" at the other end of the spectrum.

After looking at the details closely we did some sums and what we realised is, credits just don't pay. If credits expire and many thousands do every year, contributors don't get paid and clients don't get anything for their money. Is that right? We don't think so.

I have calculated that as much as $50m worth of credits have probably been wasted - not by those that benefit: the agencies that sell them, but by you. That figure could be much higher of course, but who is going to tell you how many credits each agency has sold without giving anything in return? Try asking.

bidder the pricing revolution and the secret that's not been told
There are a lot of agencies who have taken a good look at what we have been doing, certainly the top stock agencies have been tuned in for a while. It's because of this that we felt compelled to create a "dummy" launch a few weeks ago.

We have been working on bidder for months and as the time got close to launch it became apparent to us that there were quite a few people taking serious interest in what we were up to. So we decided to put them all off the scent by faking our own launch. Now, it wasn't a full blown fake launch, we still had images for sale, but we just wanted to give the impression we weren't really up to much.

Now the day has come and we have finally flipped the real switch and our marketing drive kicks in on Monday, the interest will undoubtedly be magnified.

As we only have eyes for three agencies in this space: our main competition, they are the ones we are "going for". The rest, we respect, but that's as far as our interest goes right now.

The big three agencies, who are as one would expect, very protective of their space, would have liked to have known what we were up to in our Lab, or at least their investors, future investors or new buyers would.

bidder, I can assure you, is in no stock agency prospectus, it's not been discussed by any Board or Private Equity group. Why? It's simply because they have not known about it.

Do you think they would have liked to have known? Take a guess.

bidder has been devised by us, developed by us and at great expense it has finally been made available to the vast global customer base that stock photography has.

Why then is bidder the big game changer?
If you try bidder, which you now can, you will not need this question answered, you will be able answer it for yourself. It's so user friendly, quick, intuitive and also a bit of fun, but above all it takes the buying of images and the act of getting a discount, which we all love, back to the individual.

With bidder, buyers negotiate their own discount as they used to do over the phone, before computers got in the way. Clients won't just receive a 20% off voucher, which they usually ignore, they will now be able bid: negotiate their own discount, based on merit, all day, any day.

Won't it mean lower prices?
The sole intention of bidder is to allow us to be able compete with the big three and to help continue to give our contributors and clients somewhere else to go. We wanted to offer you all something that is a potential game changer, bidder is.

You don't think that someone is going to buy or invest in any of the big three without looking at one thing: margins. The investors will be looking at how they can get their money back, how they can make more profit and as that isn't largely going be through higher prices, or selling to more clients, it will be by squeezing the supplier - or by selling more credits and finding ways of getting clients not to use them!

If you take a look at the average price of one of the big three agencies, who primarily sell images via subscription, you'll see it's $3.

We have set bidder so that clients can't bid on images priced lower than $15, so we certainly don't expect our average sale price to be anywhere near as low as $3.

There are also smaller agencies and one more of the big three who are not averse to selling images universally at $1 and below. Then, if you take a look at the third of the big triplet they are "rebranding" their $1 bin, which should tell you something about pricing pressures.

We have no intention of allowing bidder to be used to turn a $2 sale into a $1 sale, it's not what it's been set up for. What we do want to do though is sell many millions of images and we know we are not going do that by just being here: offering the same images; in the same way; through the same channels.

What else is going on?
We have a number of other new initiatives we will be launching soon, around bidder, video, search and mobile content. We are looking to sell the best content and lots of it, at the right prices, but we are also looking to bring in fresh new content from around the globe.

We have not launched bidder in an attempt to make a rapid dash to the bottom, but to help build our brand - it will also help create a massive rush of blood to the heads of the big three.

We created bidder in-house, with our vast tech team and now have a patent pending on it. We will ensure that we, as well as you guys, benefit from the hard work we have put into this brand new industry creation.

This industry needs competition and it needs new ideas, we believe we have the knowledge, backing and marketing expertise to make a real difference.

We will not rest until we have become a major force in this space, so why not come along for the ride and help us get everyone else on board too. It should be exciting.

After all, we are in this together - without you guys we are just an idea.


It's time to move on, with us.



Best regards
Russell Glenister
CEO

One person asking for a discount is not 'bidding'.  And then, why would anyone not try to get a discount?  Wasting contributors' time. 

Will you take $6?  $7?  How about $8? $9?

Anyways, Cutcaster already does 'bidding', so I doubt they'll get their 'patent', lol.  Nice market research:
"The artist will receive an email letting them know that they have a bid for one of their images and will have 48 hours to either accept the bid, negotiate or reject the bid.  In most cases, sellers react in less than 2 hours to bids."

How Do I Negotiate with Photographers?
Enlarge a photo by clicking on its thumbnail, a new page loads with the enlarged view of the photo, now click on �Negotiate� in the upper right corner of the page. You can now make an offer to a photographer and also give him the intended use of the photo. The photographer will receive an e-mail and he can either accept or decline your offer. If he accepts you have the right to buy the photo at the negotiated price for 14 days.

There are good ideas and there are bad ideas. I have an even better idea. Why not PAY people to use our images. Better yet, conduct a bidding war where the successful photographer is the one willing to pay the most to see his/her photograph used.

I just sent support there a message asking how I opt out of bidder. I think it's an insane idea - with a volume discount on credits or buying a month subscription, the buyer is doing something in return for getting the discount. For this scheme, the buyer does nothing. Their FAQ says that if they reject your bid they'll counter with something guaranteed to be less than the list price. I'm guessing they'll say I can't opt out, but it's worth asking.

I too do not recall this being mentioned anywhere when I signed up...