Whether you’re an entrepreneur or an established production company, selling video footage online involves the same principles:
Pick the business model you are comfortable with
Acquire great stock
Use proven footage library software solutions.
Give the buyer more than they expect.
Later, you can expand your business model or launch new brands to cater for different market sectors. But the business is tough enough – so start with what you know and what you are comfortable with.
Standard library business models.
The standard business models, whether its image, motion, music etc are as follows.
Niche / Specialist
Generalist
Microsite
Within each of these business models you have a choice of how you acquire and market the product. Putting acquistion aside for the moment you can sell product
Royalty free
Rights Managed
Simple licence
Discounted
Rights managed and royalty free footage and video.
Rights management for footage libraries is still evolving and, so far, it is less complex than rights management for Image libraries.
However, rights management calculations can be different for each footage library – it’s one way of keeping your competitive edge.
Market Positioning
Once you have decided on the business model and licensing type you then need to work out your market position. For example, in the race to establish market dominance several business models are being tried. Most follow the image library business models; so to sell video online in volume, companies are following the “microsite” model pioneered three years ago by istockphoto.com – who later morphed their model to istockvideo.com.