Resnick's Web Use Rates

42

October 2, 1996

Seth Resnick of Boston has been one of the pioneers in selling images through a
personal site on the World Wide Web. He has a number of observations about web
selling and has developed a structure for pricing various web uses.

The Web has become more and more defined. There are essentially five categories
of buyers on the web. It is important to look at each category to determine the
proper pricing structure for photography. As the web develops it is revealing
surprising similarity to traditional print formats in terms of how to price.
The size of the image on the page, the placement of the image, ie. home page or
linked page, length of time for display, the size of the company and the average
number of "hits" or viewers should be taken into account for accurate pricing.

In my own opinion companies selling photography on the web and not
differentiating the clients are doing an injustice to photographers and
themselves. Some companies are pricing photographs for the Web based solely on
the digital size of the image. The fact is that screen resolution only supports
72dpi so large file sizes are irrelevant.

The following is a description of each of the six categories of buyers on the
Web.

(1) Commerce Site - A commerce site is typically a national or multi-national
corporation which is using its web site as a place to physically transact
business.

(2) Content Oriented Site - There are sites that are not engaged directly in
selling on the web, but are large corporate sites providing all kinds of
information from consumer information, marketing information and possibly
downloading of software and products on a slightly smaller scale than a true
commerce site. They are large sites that are updated on a regular basis.

(3) Editorial Site - These sites are focused primarily on supplying editorial
information like Discovery Channel and USA Today.

(4) Promotional Site - These sites are specifically designed to act as a form of
advertising and promotion for a company, but do not allow the viewer to actually
buy anything directly on the site. The size of the companies range from small
regional companies to large multi-national companies and are clearly a marketing
tool.

(5) Basic Site - Basic sites refer to companies which have a web site to be part
of the electronic revolution but haven't really developed the site for much
other than an enhanced phone book type listing.

(6) Educational & Not For Profit Site - These sites disseminate information but
operate on a very limited budget.

(7) Personal Site - Personal sites range in type and size and are the area where
copyright infringement is most likely to occur. Because of the limited budget
for most of these sites any photo sales are likely to be on the very low end of
the scale.

The rates below are general pricing guidelines for one-time non-exclusive rights
for three months on a web page. Add 25% for six month use, 50% for 1 year use,
100% for 2 year use. Actual fees are based on exact use determined by reviewing
specific information about each project.

To determine the final price you must know:

1 - On screen size of image

2 - Personal use, corporate use, or advertising use etc.

3 - Length of display -- one-time non-exclusive: 1 month, six months, 1 year,
etc.

4 - Location of the image in the web site: i.e. home page, front page, secondary
page

5 - Uniqueness of the image requested.

Codes:

Search = Search Engine Home Page

Primary = Home Page or Primary Page

Secondary = Secondary Page or Link Page

For my information go to Seth Resnick's home page on the world wide web --
http://www.sethresnic.com