In the 3D assets market the most popular site, in terms of traffic, is Turbosquid. You can see on the graph that other sites are way behind and that's something typical for Internet in general. People tend to favor one site, one company and so you get eBay, Google or Youtube with a huge share of the market usually well exceeding 50%. My guestimate is that in the 3D market Turbosquid has at least 50% share and that's why I think it's a good idea to start selling assets there. Once you upload a couple of models and see what's selling well you can start uploading to other sites. The other 3D market places with significant traffic are The3Dstudio.com and Exchange3D. Others, like Falling Pixel or Flatpyramid are still way behind in terms of page views, but some vendors are quite happy in terms of the income they get. One misleading factor for Turbosquid statistics might be the fact that they host the forums for gmax software and that might generate some traffic. Nevertheless Turbosquid has been very good for me and I made quite a lot of cash there. Another factor would be the percentage you get from the base price. Turbosquid gives you 50% of the base price, some sites are more generous and will give you 55-60%. I believe that a small site called Altair Models has a 85% royalty, but with nearly no traffic it might not be worth the effort.
In the photography and illustrations market there is also one site clearly in the lead - iStockphoto. The other ones aren't too far behind as you can see on the graph and certainly iStockphoto does not have a 50% share of the market. The graph shows only two runner-ups, but actually there are three sites that are going neck to neck in terms of Internet traffic - Dreamstime, Shutterstock and Fotolia. I find all three very interesting - Dreamstime has a very clever management area and upload tools, Fotolia gets me most profit and Shutterstock has an interesting business solution. They charge buyers for a subscription instead of 'per image' price and that creates more downloads for the artists. The neat thing about photo stock sites is that they often show specific data with number of views and downloads. That's a pretty useful thing if you want to see what sells and what topics are popular. Some images are selling in hundreds or even thousands so even with the low royalty of a couple of dollars (at best) per picture one can get serious money.The footage market is a bit more complicated to analyze as both iStockphoto and Shutterstock sell footage as well as photography and vector art. Looking at the numbers at Alexa we see that only 1% of the traffic at Shutterstock are visits to footage.shutterstock.com. It's hard to say exactly how much of the traffic is generated by the motion content for iStockphoto, but one could assume that it's more or less 1% as well. Still that would give both companies the lead over the more specialized sites. Those markets dedicated to motion and/or music content are Pond5 in the lead and Revostock a bit behind the leader. Numbers for US are shown below.
Clearly site popularity is a major factor, but in the end people tend to favor some sites over the others for various reasons. Some might like the way the tools for publishers function, but at the same time, be put of by the actions of the support stuff. It's a good idea to read the forums, as almost all sites run a community site for artist to discuss certain issues. Registering is free on all of the websites, so you might just as well start selling on all of them at once, but from my experience I would advise to start with 2-3 of the biggest sites and after you get the idea of what is worth publishing move your collection to other sites. Who knows ... you might find after a while that giving exclusivity rights for your work (that usually means a higher percentage royalty) gives you best financial results and end up with only one market place.Happy selling!
Brak komentarzy:
Prześlij komentarz