Pond5 is the Stock Winner for Me

I have to share with you what the wonderful Ryan Smith wrote a while back on his linkedin. 

In case you don't know what Pond5 is, it's a stock media marketplace where people can buy and sell licenses to all kinds of videography, sound effects, music, and more.

Pond5 has a lot of things going for it, including:

1: An active community with an established customer base.

2: Artists receive 50% of every sale they make and they can set their own prices on each item they upload to Pond5.

3: An affiliate referral program that gives the URL owner 5% of every sale made by anybody who registers to Pond5 through that referral URL - and it lasts for an entire year.

4: The Customer Support team has a live chat that answers your questions, comments, and suggestions almost immediately, in contrast to a lot of sites that use a Support Ticket system that takes weeks to sort through.

Here's the only problem...

Everybody's selling their work for peanuts!

Let me tell you something from experience, both as a seller and a buyer, you are devaluing your own hard work and putting off many customers simply because you're selling excellent products at discount prices.

According to an article I read on Kissmetrics about 5 psychological studies on pricing that were conducted, people do not equate low prices with great value. In fact, it puts them off just thinking about it. Many sound effects are on sale for just $2, but a lot of people will not buy from you if they suspect that the reason your prices are low is because you're trying to shut out your competition through selling your work cheaper than anybody else.

From my own experience as a buyer and a seller of stock media, I know for a fact that you're worth more than what you may be selling your work for, and from a buyer's point of view, I care more about what goes into your work than what comes out of my pocket. If your work is excellent, I will pay excellent prices for it because the artist who prices his work fairly shows that he is proud of what he does and isn't too concerned with trying to offer a better deal than his competition. People can estimate how you really feel about your work by the way you price it.

read more on linkedin
Check out Ryan Smith on Pond5 BlinnSFX