A trend for the Future…?
Free Photos





         Advance notes: The grocery store gets you to shop there by offering a coupon that makes you an offer you can’t refuse. Commercial stock photo portals are catching on. What could be better than free
 
photos? Stock photography portals are drawing photobuyers into their websites with the alluring come-on of free photos. This kind of marketing tactic is one that editorial stock photographers don’t need to employ, because their photos grow in value as time moves on –unlike commercial stock photos that are more closely tied to trends or conform to current design dictates, and consequently fall out of fashion.

         No doubt. It’s the way of the future. Giving away photos. Free.

         Dreamstime, a Royalty-Free company, recently announced that it will give away photos each month.

         What’s the catch? It’s the first on-line image portal to announce that it’s got extra baggage it’d like to get rid of. And, in so doing, it’s wisely launching a marketing technique that is sure to be followed in the $1-a-picture on-line business. (Except that Dreamstime also features some pricey pictures.)

         Dreamstime is following a new Internet trend that has been used for years by the brick-‘n’-mortar people: overstock. When a product’s shelf life has expired (it’s not selling) they usher the items off to a second tier of businesses that are willing to take on the product (cheap!) and sell it to “dollar stores” or similar enterprises. Everyone benefits, including the customer. Extra baggage in the stock industry means extra administrative time, extra disk space, and extra keywords, not to mention disappointment on the part of buyers. Depending on the category –teens, office workers, industry, etc. – the RF pictures have a shelf life of between two to five years. After that, they are usually relegated to the trash bin.

         But how does a photobuyer benefit? Well, everyone likes something for free, whether it turns out to be useful or not. Dreamstime says that this technique opens the door to many new and potential customers. Some may never have heard of Dreamstime (you just heard about them…), some, former customers who forgot about them, and some of them window shoppers. They just might go on to become long-term customers, once they have visited the website.

         It’s not unlike the supermarket that offers an introductory coupon. ($2 off this product). It’s called a loss-leader. In this case there’s little loss to Dreamstime. Customers will come in and look around and perhaps move beyond this back door bargain section into the front of the store.

         It works. And we can expect that many similar companies will follow suit.

         Now that RF has been around for a few years, the $1-a-picture industry has come to the realization that their exquisite clichés have a limited life span. Limited shelf life in the Royalty-Free industry is a fact of life. Styles, trends, and buzz-pix become popular, then become stale, and then die. (Remember those earlier suit-with-a-briefcase-in-hand, rushing down the street? Do suits still carry brief cases, or has the style moved on to shoulder slung satchels?) The pictures Dreamstime plans to choose for giving away, will be only images that have been online for at least one year, that have had no sales.

THE EDITORIAL DIFFERENCE

         In our field of editorial stock photography, we see an opposite effect. Unlike commercial stock photos that have a short ‘shelf life’, editorial stock photos gain in their marketability. The editorial stock photographs you are capturing today can easily experience an increase in their marketability as the years
move on.          A commercial stock photograph taken in the 1990’s may have already lost its marketability, but an editorial stock photograph of an aborigine listening to a transistor radio in the 90’s will increase in its salability and become even more useable in this century.          Whether your interest area is the environment, politics, education, etc. your present pictures will be marketable not only today but also in the future. You’ll even be able to pass your collection on to your heirs as an annuity.

         Is this a new phenomenon? It has existed to a degree all along, but now it’s getting big. Now that the publishing industry, which includes physical markets (paper, newspapers, etc), but also “air-space” on TV, the Internet, and future means of publishing, has realized that nostalgia, history, and memorabilia sells. (Who would’ve thought just a few short years ago that there would be a history channel on TV?)

         If you are following a stock photo career of taking pictures in a category you love to work in, you will become a contributor to history.

         Unlike the Dreamstime people who consider their throw-aways as dead-weight and un-saleable, your pictures are becoming more valuable as time moves on.

Rohn Engh is director of PhotoSource International and publisher of PhotoStockNotes. Pine Lake Farm, 1910 35th Road, Osceola, WI 54020 USA. Telephone: 1 800 624 0266 Fax: 1 715 248 7394. Web site: www.photosource.com/products


           


           

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