“The overall market today increasingly demands images that address needs across all price spectrums—traditional and microstock. More and more Veer customers desired a broader offering. The Veer brand needed to deliver on this,” says former Veer executive Nairn Nerland, who now holds the post of senior vice president, networks, Corbis.
Through Veer’s traditional business, the company knew its customers already used microstock and wanted to offer them a budget product: the Veer Marketplace. Then, Corbis decided to roll its existing microstock business SnapVillage into its latest acquisition. In last week’s announcement of this plan, the company said that it now realized it needed a bigger and better microstock presence.
What was wrong with SnapVillage? Nothing, according to Nerland. “It was an issue of where to best apply our resources,” he explains.
Nerland also stresses SnapVillage accomplishments, such as gathering 600,000 images and 7,000 members, introducing new features—such as community tagging, comments and image sets—and attracting a large number of first-time buyers of stock photography, who were previously put off by the complexity of traditional micros.
Yet the Veer Marketplace will be very much like a traditional micro. After an a la carte phase, during which images will be sold at fixed size-dependent prices ranging from $1 to $20, the Marketplace will offer credit-based pricing and subscriptions.
SnapVillage’s pick-your-own-price method of establishing licensing fees will be phased out along with the URL. “We found contributors struggled with this price model. In turn, it affected the customer experience: They could not understand why images were priced differently,” said Nerland.
Another SnapVillage lesson, he said, was the need to provide a “seamless, engaging and rich experience for contributors, including bulk upload tools.” The biggest criticism of SnapVillage at the time of its launch was the lack of industry-standard features, such as FTP image upload capability.
Nerland also said that Veer’s track record will enable the company to market its microstock offering more successfully.
During the first phase, Veer Marketplace will continue paying SnapVillage’s 30% contributor commission. Though Nerland said that offering royalty structures that suit suppliers was a priority, he declined to discuss the commission structure ultimately planned for the new microstock business.