Mike Watson launches Moodboard Unlimited where the image buyer sets the pricing
Mike Watson, who is best known as the founder of the royalty free agency Digital Vision (which sold in 2005 to Getty Images for $165m) has been experimenting with stock image pricing with his latest ventures Mike Watson Images and Moodboard. The company has experimented with pricing Royalty Free images much higher than the current market value at over $1000 and also dabbled in microstock with images as low as a few dollars each. Now the company has announced the launch of Moodboard Unlimited, a new stock photography site where the buyer sets the pricing based on what they think it is worth. According to Mike Watson “It may seem like a crazy idea, and the creative industry might think there’s a catch, but there’s not! Pay what you want!”
This pricing model is a first for the stock photo industry but has been attempted in other industries with some success including the indie music site Magnatune where customers listen to music and set the pricing based on their perceived value. At Magnatune you have the option of paying as little as $5 but according to CEO John Buckman the average price paid is $8.93. “The industry is ready for an alternative to Getty and the establishment; so whether you’re an end-user or photographer looking for ways of monetizing photography, it’s got to be good news that there’s a cheaper, faster and more viable option. The team and I led change in the stock image industry with Digital Vision and we’re leading change again” adds Mike Watson.
The company appears to have launched the Moodboard Unlimited site with a ‘limited’ number of images in order to test the viability of the model. The site seems to lack the depth of iStockphoto or other more established micro-payment stock photography sites that tap into pro-sumer photographers to upload great quantities of images. A search for ‘people’ yielded just 450 images, ‘business’ had 127 images, and ‘animals’ returned a paltry 20 images.
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