What’s the better value for images: Micro-payments or Subscriptions?

Recently I spoke with a customer who called to renew her annual subscription and she was wondering if we were going to offer a micro-payment style site. I was fortunate that this particular customer had downloaded well over her $299.00 subscription price at even $1.00 per image. So it got me thinking. As a CEO of a subscription site you might expect this to have a certain slant. Truth be told, it does, but not one you would expect.

To gather my data I reviewed about 500 download records from a random list of PhotoSpin subscribers. On average, our typical subscriber downloads about 200 images per year. Viewing that data, micro-payment sites that charge $1.00 per image appeared to be a better value. But, after digging a bit deeper, I discovered that over 30% of the images downloaded from the PhotoSpin site were high-res files. At the most popular micro-payment site the price for the highest resolution image is $15.00. Using simple math, the advantage greatly shifts to support the subscription model. I also found that several of our customers only download high resolution images. For them, the micro-payments are not a value at all. If they download 20 high resolution images in a year, they exceed the subscription price. For the subscription customers, the benefit lies in downloading whatever they need whenever they need it, without the worry of how many credits they have available. I think that one dollar downloads are great if what you use are a small quantity of low-res images. But, if you need images for print or a large quantity of images at under a dollar per day (not a dollar per download), then the subscription model is well worth considering.

CONTENT CONTENT CONTENT CONTENT!

In case you were wondering, this blog is indeed on content: the lack of it, the importance of it, and the acquisition of it.

Recently we’ve been making a lot of changes here at PhotoSpin, most importantly the addition of our new image server (yes, it's finally up and running). This server allows us to add thousands of new images to our website each month. These images come from some of the finest sources around as we have been fortunate to have signed distribution deals with some of the best image libraries out there. We are doing this to offer our customers a more robust library filled with a large variety of high quality images. See our latest additions.

We know our customers have choices as to how and when they buy images, so our continued goal is to offer the best collection at an affordable price. By adding 1000’s of new images per month we hope to earn and keep your loyalty.