| User Generated Content for Stock Footage Libraries |
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In the footage market today there are, broadly speaking, two types of company. Specialist niche operators and multi-national marketers.
Both types of business have an identical problem – how to get enough quality stock to make a plausible offer to users.
In the past cross distribution deals with Hollywood helped the majors to appear viable but in reality the choice of footage remains very limited in comparison with the parallel stock image industry.
One of the ways the footage industry is solving the problem is to work with freelance and pro/am film makers and video operators to sell their stock footage on a commission basis. As a subset of this activity the UGC or user generated content model has emerged.
What started as a subset – it was iStockphoto.com who more or less invented it – has now become mainstream, for the largest companies at least. Istock, Corbis, Thought Equity, Getty, Pond5 – all of them operate UGC systems.
How it works
Freelance videographers upload clips. The clips are reviewed by editors and added or rejected. The clip is offered for sale on the site (Pond 5 allow contributors to create their own prices) and once sold the revenue is split. The majors pay contributors around 30% commission; the split can increase to the contributor if their clips sell consistently.
At month end the system calculates commissions due and provides a payment list for a bank or Paypal. Paypal has a very useful and low cost multiple payment system
The main differentiators in the systems are the number and type of filter processes put into the contributor sign up process – this to reduce the amount of dross that would otherwise be uploaded. UGC Libraries also ask contributors to include a variety of Metadata to assist admin and search.
One added problem for small libraries is that Google algorithms use the number of pages a site has to decide how important and expert it is – smaller sites have a problem with high rankings because they are not as “expert” as a site with more clips. So if smaller or specialised sites want to expand quickly then UGC - user generated content – is one way to go.
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