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Originally posted by shap
I understand what you are saying Mutt. I think what happened was the webmasters bought the content relatively cheap. Then went out and with their marketing skills found ways to make the most of the content. The content providers saw this and tried to get a piece of their pie. And the same time other content providers saw the need for new content, picked up a camera and charged lower rates than the existing guys. So you've got new competition driving prices lower, and webmasters innovative marketing driving existing providers to increase their price. Everybody is greedy and the top of the line content providers suffer the most. I believe there is definitely a way both can co-exist with the presence of Hosted Galleries.
The current business model does not work. Content providers tried to sell their content to large amounts of webmasters at a low price. Quanity vs Quality. Result is they got screwed. They sold to the low end webmaster who whored the content out on TGPS.
I believe there will always be a demand for Glamour and High End Amateur Photography. A beautiful babe sells. That's the bottomline. I think it's time for the top content providers to come up with a new Business model. Semi Exclusive deals at a higher price. Charly mentioned it costs in the $100 range per set. I know in the US it could cost $300 to $500 per set. So let's for arguements sake say at $300 revenue per set the provider is making a decent profit. If that provider puts the content for sale at $100 per set and only sells 10 licenses (which allow hosted galleries). That's $1000 revenue and more than $700 profit. You can't tell me there aren't 10 sites around willing to pay $100 a pop for quality content. I could round up 10 sites on my own within a day. Right there the webmaster is happy and the provider is happy. Can this business model work?
People say exclusive is the way. Yes i agree. There are a shitload of surfers who enjoy and are willing to pay to look at pictures. The key to a picture based member's area doing well is high amounts of high quality content. Exclusive is great but it gets tough to be 100% exclusive and be able to deliver the quantity expected by the surfer. It's a real toss up. You can either be like 1by day and Stephen Hicks and add 1 ULTRA high quality set a day (which will cost you more than $1000 a set) or go mostly exclusive like ATK and add huge amounts of content weekly. I still believe there is a profitable market for high end photography that isn't 100% exclusive.
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all true.
but it's a big world, and many beautiful women in 3rd world locations.
beauty that cost $800-1000 in los angeles can be found for $25-50 usd just by getting on an airplane.