• Asked by
• Kevin H.
• |
• January 20, 2012
• |
• Nobody else has this question

Is it bad being exclusive to IS?

Hello Yuri

You once mentioned that IS is not as good as it used to be. Does this mean that it is a disadvantage being an exclusive contributor at IS compared to being non-exclusive and uploading to multiple agencies?

• Answered by
• Yuri
• |
• May 2, 2012
• |
• No one likes this yet

The ballgame is probably changing a little bit at the moment, and yes, I think it's changing in the sense that it's not as good being exclusive to IS as it was back two or three years ago. The monopoly that IS seemed to have in the area of microstock has been challenged by a lot of other agencies including FT and SS.

I think that the shift in power has been primarily due to an unsuccessful launch of their agency collection and higher price collections simply pushing prices too high in order to squeeze out more money. I simply don't think that buyers like to pay 10 or 20 times as much money for an image without getting something extra.

We also have more expensive licenses here on PI, but when this is the case, an image will generally be better. It will be of much higher quality, more artistic in some sense, exclusive to our site and can not be found elsewhere and you might get exclusive rights to using the images for a specific period of time. We believe that this is one of the things you have to offer if you want to license images at a higher price, because there are so many great images available at low prices, so you really have to offer something special. :)