I read this morning Hillel post on his daughter ballet pictures.
It is a very interesting coincidence that I share the same feelings as he did about professional photographers being stuck in a dead business model.
Two weeks ago me, my wife and my son went to take some family pictures with an excellent photographer. She is a close friend of Paul (Sampa's CEO). The package included 4 prints. The session was excellent and the results were fantastic.
I really didn't care much for the prints since I can do them myself, so I asked about the option of getting the hi-res pictures... To which she replied as if this was the most normal thing in the world: $75 per TIFF, or $2,500 for all of them.
Over the last 7 days, Paul and I spent a bit of time discussing what I think it is broken on this business.
To begin with, photographers were a different beast when there was no digital picture, which is pretty much just a decade ago. They could charge as much as they wanted for prints because it was too hard to reproduce them.
The other important point is that they currently consider themselves as "manufacturers" instead of "service providers", this is, the print *is* the product, not the photo session on itself. Again, this is broken. They charge a reasonable amount on a per-hour basis, and then overcharge on a per-print basis.
So, why don't they change?
Let's see. Today they charge anywhere from $75 to $250 per hour of photo shoot. Then they charge between $10-$50 per print and $50-200 per digital copy. After all is said and done the value they get from you goes from $200 all the way to a few thousand dollars for a multi-hour event, like a Wedding (it can actually go well beyond $10K).
Ten years ago, if you wanted a new set of prints for your mother-in-law, you'd have to order from them, so they would get an extra couple hundreds from you.
Nowadays, you are way more likely to scan it, share it on a site, or just go to one of these places that will scan and print for less than $1 per picture. Yet, photographers have not realized the world has changed.
Why?
Here is my view on this: They are artists, and as good artists they are not very savvy on the business side. They can, and do, innovate on their art, using new tools and techniques, but they don't mess with the business model because they don't understand the consequences, so, they just copy what everybody else is doing.
The problem is that the world has changed. What they considered a core piece of their work (prints) have become commodity, or, worse yet, irrelevant.
A new wave of photographers, let's call them the Facebook generation, gets it. I'll predict this new generation will take a lot of photographers out of business. That will cause a major shift on the industry the same way Turbo Tax changed the accounting industry forever.
Believe it or not, we had all (tens of thousands) Sampa sites running from a single server.
Although I bought and configured the second server a couple of months ago, I was postponing to put this server in rotation to avoid having to maintain an extra server.
Because of our growth and some major features coming on the next few weeks, it was time to activate this server. It's live now.
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on his daughter ballet pictures.
January, 2008