In my last post, I presented some information on how customers are using our Index Open subscription. On balance, it seems that the product is being used about as we had hoped.
=> The average customer downloads 1.4 high resolution images per day.
=> 95% of customers download 5 images per day or fewer. Two thirds use one or fewer images. Only 3% on average download more than 5 images per day.
=> About 20% of the customers have not downloaded any images, at all.
=> Our survey evidence suggests that more than 90% of the images
downloaded are used only in comps and layouts. Less than 10% go into
final projects.
=> Only about one third of the customers have used the maximum number of images allowed, in a single day (25 images). Most never seem to make maximum use of the subscription.
After looking at this information, I still wanted to know about the pattern of use. Were customers taking their one, two or five images at a steady rate? Or, were they instead pulling down images in spurts and chunks? I looked at the percentage of time that each user accessed the site, and was pleased with the distribution. More than 60% of our customers were using the site at least every ten days. Only a few percent were using it more often than every other day.
Based on the above, we can describe four main categories of customer:
1. Heavy daily users. These customers hit 25 downloads fairly often and download every day or two. Only 3% to 7% of customers fall in this category.
2. Spurt users. These customers download up to 25 images, every five to fifteen days. About 30% of customers fall in this category.
3. Regular users. These customers download 1 to five images every five to fifteen days. About 45% of users fall in this category.
4. Non-users. About 20% of buyers have not yet used the subscription for a high resolution download.
I wondered if there was any long-term trend towards "converting" customers from the lower use category to the higher use category. I decided to look for this, by comparing the average number of images used per day, against the number of days that a customer had been subscribed. I felt that an upward slope would indicate that customers "learned" to use the subscription more and more, as time went on. A downward slope would indicate instead that customers gradually come to rely on the subscription being there, and spread out their use. My analysis showed no clear trend. There was no "bump" at 180 days--the time when customers could load up on images, and then cancel their subscription. So, there is little evidence that users are shifting from one style of use to another, or that the subscription is encouraging hoarding of images.
We have noticed that customer often download the same image from us. More than 5% of downloads are repeat requests by a customer for an image he or she has already downloaded. We have no evidence of image hoarding and the huge majority of users seem to using their subscription as a steady, reliable supply of images to support their daily nees. Our subscription seems to have become a convenient "digital asset management system" for our images.
The subscription seems also good news for the artists who have contributed to it. Artists earn commission on subscription use based on the subscription revenue booked each month, divided by the number of image dowloads. Each image download gets the same credit, each month. (If a customer re-downloads within that month, the artist does not get double credit. But, they do earn money several times from the same customer, if a customer re-downloads an image in two different months.)
At 1.4 images per day, the median subscriber is likely to download about 250 images over the six month life of a subscription. This works out to about $2.40 per image--about the same credit per image to an artist as on a 100 image RF CD sale. The subscription images remain available for one-off royalty-free license on the main Index Stock site--the Index Open artists are not giving up their single image sale opportunities. As with CDs, most of the images downloaded via the subscription are not used in final projects. Each time a customer searches for something on the Index Open site, the customer gets a single click chance to see all other similar images on the main Index Stock site. This gives each Index Open artist the chance to build traffic to his or her other images, on the main site.
Both our customers and artists seem to be getting good value and a fair deal from
the Index Open subscription. The subscription
continues to produce value throughout the life of a subscription and generate good reasons for customers to renew, at the end. Customer behavior seems to be
stable over the life of the subscription. Despite the fears I have heard expressed about abuse, misuse, confusion, and disaster, subscriptions such as Index Open seem to be a sensible, responsible way of providing images users with high quality stock photos.
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