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.
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2 comments:
It may well be that subscribers download higher res images because they can, not necessarily because they need them to be high res.
A Subscriber
True your point is well taken – however with a subscription service you get the choice.
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