San Francisco-based Cutcaster has launched a “best of the best” collection under a name that takes on iStockphoto’s recent launch of premium collection Vetta.
iStock’s Vetta—Italian for “peak”—launched in June with 35,000 edited photos and vectors exclusive to the Getty Images-owned microstock. Images are licensed at $20 to $70, a substantial increase from standard micro pricing.
Cutcaster’s Betta than Vetta—billed as distinctively Irish for “mountaintop”—launched with 500 image and vector graphics, picked by the young company’s reviewers and industry professionals. Pricing ranges from $1 to $35 per image. The collection contains both Cutcaster-exclusive and non-exclusive content, which will grow over time.
According to Cutcaster, Betta than Vetta offers buyers a new and untapped source of imagery priced by the market. “What Cutcaster provides is better search, better results, better rights offering and all at better market prices,” explains Cutcaster founder John Griffin.
The company offers contributors a chance to price higher-value images accordingly. This factor is the key differentiator between Cutcaster and other crowdsourced companies: it allows sellers to set their own prices or use the Cutcaster Algorithm to find what the company says is the fair market price.
Another atypical Cutcaster feature is the buyer ability to bid on content. The company released figures that buyers choose to bid—as opposed to buy at list price—roughly 6% of the time. The average bid is 40% below the listed price. Sellers typically respond to buyers in less than 1.5 hours, and buyers accept the final offered price in 43% of such cases.
Griffin founded Cutcaster in early 2008. Now, he says he is excited by the company’s growth. He says sales have been doubling monthly, and the collection has grown to nearly 400,000 images since March, when it stood at 150,000. The recently launched corporate accounts program and new buyer signups are also growing, Griffin adds.