For once in a very long time, I actually like some of my race photos.
But, I'm sad to say, I'm forced to steal them with the watermark of the company across my body,and not pay for them. Why? The price.
Here are three of the many purchase options. The smallest print, and then digital download:
- 1 printed postcard size (5x7) for $14.99
- Each photo digital download: $29.99
- All photos digital download: $69.99
Yes, I understand that there are costs involved with having multiple photographers travel to the race site, pay them their fee, and costs of doing business etc., but there's also a thing called economics, supply and demand, and optimal prices.
FAIL #1
Not many people care for a print copy these days, unless they're going to frame one. Typically, people want digital copies so they can print on their own, and store like every other photo they ever take themselves. Online photo storing sites charge way less than $15 a photo.
FAIL #2
Digital photos should not cost me $29.99. If this was the finish line photo, and it was AWESOME, and I had just run 100 miles, maybe I would pay $30. MAYBE. But probably not.
I personally have only ever purchased one race photo and that was at the Boston Marathon. Simply put, prices are too high. I had a discussion with some friends about this and everyone seems to agree. We came to the consensus that we would be willing to pay, and probably would buy more race photos if they were priced as follows:
- Each digital photo: $2.99-$3.99
- Entire Album of my race photos: $11.99
While I haven't done the statistical calculations and don't pretend to know if this would be viable for the company that takes the photos, I'm pretty sure they'd be happier to have ($11.99 x 3 = 36) $36 dollars from 3 different runners who would have paid for all their photos, as opposed to zero dollars for zero purchased photos.
I recently read an article about Kodak, and how it lost its leadership. Essentially, the article said that Kodak failed to understand that they were in the business of making memories, and not selling a specific product. They failed to embrace the way the world of memories went, and everyone passed them by.
I also read this quote, which touches on a similar concept about record companies and how they need to adapt to their changing market. Stop trying to sell CD's and embrace the digital world:
"You record company guys THINK you are in the wine business, but you are really in the bottling business. What happens when the bottle goes away?"
What would you pay for 1 digital photo, and for a whole set of say 8 or 9 photos?
7 comments:
Holy crap, 30 bones for a digital download? Does anybody pay that? I would expect those kind of prices from Boston, not Bandera. Race photographers are starting to take themselves a bit too seriously.
We had a guy out on the course for the Rescue Run taking pictures. He charged $5 for a digital pic, then donated that $5 to the local Search & Rescue. I don't mind that at all.
That's too much for digital images. Criminey.
Although I never side with the pirates vs. the record companies, I also never miss a chance to vilify the record company execs as useless moron dinosaurs. I hope companies like Apple continue to do their job for them an make all the money they didn't make. I hope they end up living in a van by the river. Idiots.
PS - Sorry if you're a record company executive ;)
Today's word verification is 'balout' I don't know what to make of that.
Cost of equipment to do this reasonably well: about $8k-$10k worth of camera & computer gear, per photographer. Maybe get away with $4k if you don't want very good quality images.
To cover a trail race, maybe 10 hours of time. Probably requires driving from somewhere like Austin, out to Bandera, no doubt staying the night, hotel, camping, gas costs.
Web site hosting costs, plus backup/ storage. Probably paying some backend company to actually print/ process the images for you for hardcopy - They charge $1-$2 per print for 8x10s.
Time to process/ deal with images if someone wants to buy one - maybe 15-20 minutes if you want to do an ethically decent job. The up front watermarking/ uploading is mostly automated - maybe 2 - 3 hours to filter out the dross and upload. If you are lucky you might have some way to target them to participants, automatically. Most people tag race numbers by hand - thats a long and boring job too. (expensive if you consider your hourly costs)
At the end of it, race photography is something of a scattergun process, you take lots of shots and hope to make a few hits/sales. $4 per image wouldn't come close to covering the costs of taking them, never mind trying to make a profitable business.
Just sounds like you aren't in the target demographic for purchasing the images (which is basically: first time participants/ one and done participants or the small pool of people who buy everything and anything they are in) It's also why most race photos are basically crap - you don't want to take one or two great photos of one or two people in the race, you want to take the boring, easy percentage shots that will be averagely good, of almost everyone in the race. Good shots are higher risk (of missing the shot), so more chance of not having a picture to sell to the one person who buys anything with them in it.
I did this for a few years for T3, and charged the sorts of prices you are talking about for physical prints (basically covering print costs) and gave away facebook sized versions of the digital files. I figured I was losing about $250-$500 each time I covered a race, once various people bought images at those prices, once I considered fuel/ transport/ camera wear/ tear/ (e.g., having to buy a new shutter for $400 due to taking so many more pictures than I would normally) web site hosting costs. I don't include the typical 10 hours+ I'd spend taking and making images available.
I only made money by having large companies steal my images and publish them without permission and then catching them at it, which would make for an interesting business model.
So $10k upfront equipment costs, maybe another $500 a year in insurance/ liability coverage, and $250-$500 per race you cover in time/ equipment.
$3-$4 per participant isn't going to cut it, even if you get 50% of them to pay that, and not just take the watermarked version anyway (I'd give mine away and people would still crop off my name/ url, etc) or try to use them for free for advertising.
I don't buy race photos either, because they are too expensive.
as a follow-on: None of the people in these pictures bought copies of the images. I'd say they are better than the average race photos you could get, but still, no sales (which is fine, but people don't even buy pictures when they are good and cheap)
swimming
IMTX11
AustinTri10
Interesting insight, Gordon. I've always been curious to know what the per racer buy rate from the race photos sites is. Say with 500 racers, do they get 5 to buy something, 10, 25?
I really compare it to the video games, where much of my market has gone from boxed mass market $40-$50 games to download $1 games. Lots of other factors (including amount of work put into it), but there has been more money to be made on the low price, high volume stuff.
That's why I wonder whether you could make up the difference (and more) with higher volume. If you normally had 10 people spend $15 in photos for a 500 person race, you earned $150. The big question is at $1 or $3 a download, could you get 50 or 100 people to buy something. 50 people buying three $1 photos each, gets you the same revenue. And I think you'd really be able to market more and push that buy percent up from 5% with the lower price.
The only way this would work would be to really automate and lower per-race costs. You'd have to just process the images and slam them up to the web, have the entire purchase and download process automated (once you dump your thousands of files from the race on the server, all you do is watch the sales data). So you definitely would need some good server/web software.
I just wish some existing race photo company would just give it a shot, try it for a couple races and see if they got enough increased volume to make up for the lower per photo revenue.
I just looked at some of those Austin Tri pics you took, Gordon- WOW those are gorgeous.
Glenda
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