Hey guys,

Quick question. I got approached by a conpany who wants to license about 10k of my images for some artificial intelligence project. They want to pay 0.08 $ for each image once. That would we like 800 $ for nothing...mmmm.should I accpet that deal? What do you think?

Thanks!

Dear Adobe,

For years we had been in the situation that content supply is abundant. And yes, this is still true. In some Areas.

With the recent development in Stock Video licensing the race to the bottom leads straight to a dead end. That is: professional Video and Animation content is not profitable to produce anymore . And this opens opportunities:

1. Stock Video is not the same as stock photos. Cutting prices in Photos is much easier since many hobbyists, professionals, semi-professionals use stock as a secondary source of income, oftenly for material they would have produced anyways. A scene of photography production houses has grown over decades and the creation is by far not as complex as professional Video. Uploading a photo today costs seconds and there are a myriad of stock agencies where you can source money from with photos, which reduces the liability of proper pricing of individual outlets. Uploading a 4K Video is a lot more complex and there are only a few sites to sell them - a price cut as we see now on shutterstock cannot be compensated easily by just uploading to some other sites. The cost and revenue relation of Photo to Commission is also much better than from Footage to (Subscription) commission. The demand for photos is also higher and higher volume compensated oftenly for lower prices.

Nobody will produce and process good 4K clips for subscription prices. If people want some exposure or benefit other than licensing income they will rather upload their footage to Youtube then subscription agencies. The marketis different.

2. The Libraries are great now. Nobody cares about exclusive material? Yes, the libraries are great, but given the factor in 1. this will change. Maybe you find easy to produce clips there, but not the great location with 5 Models or the complex 3D Animation with 120 hours render time anymore. This material will simply not be produced anymore due to the lack of profitability. Buyers will look at a increasingly crappy video library. And especially in Video the market can be assumed to be consisting of a higher percentage of professional customers. Times changed, but still not ever stock video buyer is a youtube guy arming another conspiracy video.

In a few years you could achieve dominance in the footage stock area for more demanding clients who need more than a pizza from top video.

3. Nobody risks sales on all the other sites? Maybe with Photos this is true since there are much more sites and outlets to sell pictures and the market is much more dynamic, but remember that there are far less profitable sites for Video. Also, the revenue of a regular footage sale soon will compensate for 10 sales on Shutterstock. Looking at the actual sales figures and estimating that 90% of future shutterstock sales come from Subs, Adobe sales would ALREADY have the same value or exceeding this value without even changing the commission structure. This all comes with the factor that footage is much less of a volume market. Even considering that nowadays you have many small players licensing stock video...who is gonna download 20 Gigs of 4K clips just because he can? A nice photo is easily downloaded on a subscription site. 4K footage not. Volume will not compensate for the massive decrease in sales price and those sites selling subscriptions are abandoned easily.

4. Experience shows already that many did not and do not bother to upload to low priced agencies. While it is true that there are always some guys uploading to the cheapos, many held back from it, especially professional producers. In the photo market most contributors jumped on every site no matter how cheap. This makes it more likely to create a better and more important exclusive library.

5. In Photography you have much more similar material which makes image exclusivity more irrelevant. As said, footage is different. It will only get produced when worthwhile and the competition of producers is much lower and hobbyists wont upload 20 clips with 60GB of footage as easy as 20 photos with 200 MB.

6. The race to the bottom is what it is. You can run into that direction as long a supply is not an issue and the buyer is the king. But as in any market, everything reaches a flipping point. With footage we have reached this point.  The one who is able to reserve exclusive rights to great content without even investing anything else than trust and fair commissions will attract the most professional buyers. Not today. Not in September. But as soon as the existing libraries get flooded with crap and lack of better quality supply.

7. The prices for Stock Video are falling? Yes. True. But this considers a well saturated offer on the content side. This was held up in the past by different sites with different commissions structures as mentioned above. As soon as the cheap sites dominant you just cannot cover the cost of production. The consequence is lack of great new content.