Interview with Aaron of Kraken Images

If you are a follower of Alex Rotenberg’s great blog, you will probably have seen his interview a few weeks back with Aaron Amat, the CEO of Kraken Images. As you all know (and I’m painfully aware), I’m not at all good at people images, and don’t feel I really understand the market as well as I do for my conceptual and topical shots, so after reading Alex’s questions, I had some more in my mind. I put a couple of them as comments against Alex’s article. Aaron contacted me out of the blue to ask if I was interested in asking him questions directly and so I put my thinking cap on and came up with my own additions to what Alex had covered. Here are the results!

How are you trying to migrate customers from buying via a stock agency through to buying from your own website? I’m assuming that you think you can get a better return if you don’t have to pay commission to an agency?

When you open your own website you realize how enormously complicated it is to get your own customers. Many people underestimate this and fail. You have to understand that big agencies have huge collections of images. Our aim is not to “migrate” the clients we have in the agencies, but to combine the two things. We continue to working with the agencies, and many of our clients prefer to buy our images that way. This is understandable, since many of them also need vectors or content that we do not have at the moment.

It’s not just about having better commissions, I think the most interesting thing of all is to have direct contact with the client. That feedback we get from customers is enormously valuable. 

I was surprised (and a little dismayed) by the pricing of your images on your own website – $1 a month for 10 images and there is no difference depending on whether you want a web sized image or the full 7900 pixel original. You have the cost of processing that charge, so you perhaps end up with 7c per image if people actually download the 10 images. Even if they just wanted one, it is a pretty good deal compared to what agencies are trying to sell photos for. Do you think this is where we need to price images to beat the “free” sites?

Our prices are not yet fixed, we are investigating which prices work best. We plan to completely redesign our pricing system. Those who pay $1 a month can download 10 images, but not in full size, they can get images of 2,000px width. Nor can they download .png without background. You can only download .jpg.

The idea of this hyper-reduced plan is that users have a gateway to our website, with a small payment they can take the first step and try our system and test our images. The idea is that after a while, if they are satisfied, they will switch to other more complete plans. We don’t know what prices we will set yet, but customers who are currently at these prices will be able to keep their subscription intact.

I think that the “Netflix model” served to reduce piracy in the cinema a lot. Maybe something similar in photography could unseat all those “free” sites

Shutterstock has recently become very picky about duplicate or similar shots. I can sometimes upload 3 shots from a series and one of them is rejected as being similar. I see that you often have 10 or 20 of the same model in relatively similar poses (although perhaps less so in your most recent shoots). Do you think Shutterstock treats very large contributors differently and do you ever have images rejected?

No doubt they are much more demanding now than they were a while ago. Still I think that kind of rejection is a miscellaneous rejection. That is, if the reviewer is not convinced of a series of images for various reasons, it is easy for him to reject many of those photos as “similar”. When in fact the motives are different, whether it is limited commercial value or whatever. Above all, they reject a lot of images from trips, I think reviewers are very tired of seeing images taken on vacation or of random objects on the street. If the reviewer loves your work and knows that he will have buyers it is easy for him to accept it. In addition to this, we have to take into account that some of our images look similar, but conceptually they are very different. Reviewers know this. For example:

These two images look similar, but the customer who buys the first one is very different from the one who will buy the second one. That is, what agencies hate is that the same customer has to choose between very similar photos. You have to try as much as possible to avoid self-competition. 

I’m not a people shooter (as my portfolio makes clear) and I have often wondered how often photos of a person against a plain backdrop with a range of different expressions actually gets picked up and used. Your own site has this model on the home page, which leads to this range of emotions:

There are 30 different shots here for a subject that I would have thought was in relatively little demand. What sort of success rate do you expect from a series of images such as these? It could well be that I totally misunderstand the “people” market for imagery so please take that into account!

You’re right, many of these images have a very low demand. We often produce very specific niches that despite not having much demand we are the only ones in the world that have made them. For instance, following your example, if someone is looking for “crown senior man meditate” on Shutterstock all the images are practically ours. The client who needs something like this will definitely buy the image from us

You also have a very wide range of what I would call environment shots – where the person or animal in some cases is involved in some activity in a realistic scene. Which do you find make the better sellers? So if someone is starting with people shots, should they aim to get the studio ones online or aim more for realistic story telling, perhaps?

Without a doubt, the images in real scenarios are what sells the most, they are also the most expensive to make. In one of those shoots we produce much less images and they require much more time for post-processing. The color and intensity of the light changes every time and everything has to be adjusted in the editing stages. In addition, when it is a group of people we have to pay many models at the same time. Our goal is that one day 90% of our images will be of this type. But we are still far from that goal. Besides, they are much more fun to make.

What do you think about stock video? It needs different lighting, different models (perhaps) and a whole different way of telling a story. Is that something you are involved in, or planning to move into? How do you think it would alter your workflow and ideas for new shoots?

Producing video is a great opportunity that we are passing up, but we must concentrate on producing images. In the future we do plan to produce video, but we will only do so when we can guarantee a high level of production of both types of content. We need to have pictures of all the themes that exist, so our clients find interesting to contract a subscription with us. If we start producing video, vectors, illustrations, audio etc… it is very easy that we would become a website that has very little of each type. It is better to specialize and cover new formats when we have mastered others.

There was a discussion on the MSG (and in a post on my site) about the percentage of sold versus unsold assets on Adobe stock. Have you any idea where you would fit in that analysis – do you have any specific targets for how many images from a series actually sell?

It’s a very interesting post! It is revealing, and to some extent, disturbing to know how huge that percentage can be. Even more worrying is knowing the percentage of images that are not only never sold but are never seen by anyone. That is to say, you produce an image, you upload it and it is never seen by anyone except you and the reviewer (assuming it is not a robot).

Still, I don’t give too much importance to those ratios, I think they are not very useful. They only reflect a reality that we can hardly change. The market is saturated, yes, but that is something we already know. I think we should not become obsessed with that and focus ourselves on other, more useful statistics. Like performance per image. The truth is that I do not know what our unsold image ratio is, but I am sure it is quite high as well.

I hope you found this interesting! What stood out to me is the breadth of his goal: We need to have pictures of all the themes that exist, so our clients find interesting to contract a subscription with us. Certainly a major challenge but with 1.4M images already available, there can’t be many more themes to address! Or maybe I am wrong once again!