Creative Market allows you to place your photos in front of over 1 million members. You set your own prices and earn 70% of every sale. The arrangement is non-exclusive so you can simultaneously market the same images through any other outlet you want. There is no approval process. Everything you submit is uploaded.
Creative Market is designed to appeal to customers looking not just for photos, but graphics, templates, themes, fonts, Add-ons and 3D. It is customer focused, not supplier driven. To date it has 1,078,466 “members,” (people who use visual content) and 272,521 “products” submitted by 9,072 independent creators. 177,853 of the products are photos. The photos are divided into 16 categories with a heavy emphasis on Food & Drink, Nature, Architecture and People (see below).
| Category |
Images |
| |
|
| Abstracts |
6,890 |
| Animals |
6,426 |
| Architecture |
15,941 |
| Arts & Entertainment |
4,635 |
| Beauty & Fashion |
3,713 |
| Business |
3,580 |
| Education |
1,479 |
| Food & Drink |
42,071 |
| Health |
1,673 |
| Holidays |
7,494 |
| Industrial |
4,318 |
| Nature |
36,089 |
| People |
15,015 |
| Sports |
3,877 |
| Technology |
3,391 |
| Transportation |
4,368 |
Pricing Filter
Creative Market has a neat pricing filter that lets the customer choose a price range they are willing to pay to use an image. The filter only shows images in that price range. Prices range from as low as $2 to $500, but 87.5% of the images currently in the collection are priced between $2 and $10, a little over 12% are priced between $11 and $30 and less than one-half of 1% are priced above $30.
Consequently, while creators can set a high price for use of their images the likelihood that such images will be purchased is very slim.
Collection Size
The relatively small size of the collection can be an advantage for many users. By using additional keywords to focus their search for subjects in a particular category users can quickly see all the images available on a particular subject.
With almost any conceivable search through the 40 to 60 million image databases of their competitors, more images than anyone has time to review will appear. Then, the user must hope that the most appropriate image for her needs is near the top of the search order and the perfect image isn’t just five or ten images below the point where she decides to stop searching.
Of course, since there is no product approval or editing, lots of similar images are likely to be added to the collection in a relatively short period of time. That means the collection is likely to quickly grow to a point where it will be hard for users to find the right image. However, in the meantime, until the collection grows too large, it may be a short term opportunity for some image suppliers.
Opportunity For Niche Producers
Creative Market has been acquired by Autodesk, Inc. Autodesk generated $2.54 billion in revenue last fiscal year and operates as a design software and services company worldwide. The company’s Architecture, Engineering and Construction segment offers Autodesk Building Design Suites to manage various phases of design and construction.
It is interesting that one of the strong points of the Creative Market collection is Architecture. Image creators that produce images of value and interest to the Architecture, Engineering and the Construction segments of business might want to consider placing images in the Creative Market collection. Certainly Autodesk will promote this collection of images and design tools to its customer base.