Pricing photo & video apps, cameras and print products

What if the race to the bottom becomes the race to the top?

Remember the days when we all complained that you that couldn’t make money from selling photo apps when most photo apps were either free or the average price of the paid apps was $2.71 for a perpetual license? Or from selling dirt-cheap compact cameras? Or from selling photo print products that nobody in their right mind would buy without a serious promo?

Well, this is what happened: 

• Unless you want to go super viral in order to eventually monetize your app through sponsorships or ads, the way to go these days for any self-respecting photo or video app is by selling it through monthly or annual subscriptions. Here’s just one example: Lightricks’ Facetune app used to cost $3.99 in 2016 for a perpetual license; now it costs $48 a year or $9.99 a month.

• The point-and-shoot and DSLR camera segments have become just a sliver of what they once were, but the more expensive mirrorless lens cameras are making money. Camera manufacturers have cranked up their prices so much that these increases have more than compensated for any declines in volume.

• And photo print products? It’s the higher-priced products, such as photobooks, wall décor or various photo merchandising products, that drive most photo print vendors’ revenues. Based on conversation with photo print industry friends, my impression is also that “Grouponization” of commodity products, such 4x6 prints, appears to be much less rampant than it was before COVID.

Our photo industry is not an island. That’s why it is important to keep an eye on any nascent macro-economic trends that could potentially make its way to our industry as well: specifically, I’d like zoom in on one trending economic phenomenon that does not just stop the race to the bottom (pricing), but actually makes a drastic turn upwards, called premiumization.

In case you haven’t been in any corporate investment calls recently, the buzzword du jour there is premiumization, according to Saturday’s insightful New York Times article (the term was apparently used in nearly 60 earnings calls and investor meetings over the past three weeks).

In short: in our post-pandemic economy the top 40% of US earners are sitting on more than a trillion dollars in extra savings amassed during the early part of the pandemic, while lower-income households have been burning through their savings, partly as they contend with the higher costs of the food, rent and other necessities that make up a bigger chunk of their spending. 

March 15, 8:00 – 9:30 am PST

(4:00 – 5:30 pm CET)

Photo Print App Innovation

Live demos and discussions with by 8 innovative photo print app developers

85+ fellow industry attendees:

Startup founders and corporate executives from the global photo ecosystem

Buy your ticket now! Presenter descriptions.

Presenters:

Roger Bloxberg, CEO, PlanetArt

Laura Sparks, Sr. Product Manager, Special Projects, Blurb

Serge Morel, CTO, Stampix

Thomas Beguin, Co-CEO, IXXI

Kirandeep Kaur, Business Manager Mobile Commerce, ip.labs

Malhar Patil, Co-Founder, Zingcam

Axel Lilienblum, Founder & CEO, Grow

Guillaume Martin, CEO & Co-Founder, Pictarine

Buy your ticket now! Presenter descriptions.

Sponsors:

As a result, there’s a sharp divide between on one side the folks who’d be happy to pay a bit more for products they perceive to be premium, vs. those who on the other side who have to put the brakes on their spending. 

How have businesses responded to the opportunities and challenges posed by this widening of the economic divide? 

• They simply raised their prices of their core products, but this is increasingly a risky affair, given the divide we just described. Not only will those who cannot afford the higher prices vote with their wallet, in some cases the more price-sensitive customers could even organize a public outcry that could hurt your brand (as the Walt Disney parks recently experienced).

• They launched a premium offering in addition to their core product, catering to those who won’t flinch to pay more for what they perceive to be of higher value. You don’t think that’s feasible with your products? Well, if even products like Krispy Kreme doughnuts or WD-40 lubricants can figure out new premium versions of the type of products that everyone has known for ages, I bet you can do too!

Image created through generative AI by PixelVibe.

Let’s switch back to our photo & video product world. What does today’s premiumization trend mean if you’re selling photo or video products?

• A divided economy enables you to sell products with features and pricing that correspond to the needs of consumers on both sides of the divide: you can go low and go high by segmenting your products and their pricing for the commodity as well as the premium markets.  

• If you don’t have the resources to do both: pursue just one side of the market: go low or go high! 

• As this divide keeps widening, a recipe for disaster is to pursue consumers on both sides of the divide by offering middle of the road products at middle of the road prices – but… there is no middle road; there is just a big chasm plop in the middle! 

Examples?  

Cameras: with a few exceptions, the traditional digital camera manufacturers have mostly gone high: selling fewer and fewer cameras at higher and higher prices. Some have gone high and low – the most obvious one being Fujifilm, which now offers anything from $5K+ medium format cameras to $50 instant film cameras.

Apps: many once top-downloaded photo apps have repositioned themselves from advertising- and in-app purchasing-monetizable apps that aim to go viral among young users, to apps that now attract an older and less price-sensitive demographic – users who don’t shy away from paying for subscriptions to apps they truly value. Examples abound, such as previous Visual 1st presenters Picsart, VSCO, Lightricks, PicCollage, Prequel and Photo Lab, who have all realigned their app’s positioning and pricing towards “high(er)” and are successfully offering subscriptions.

Photo print products: what is an ancient use case – printing photos has been at the birth of film cameras after all – has gone through drastic transformations in recent years. When we started Visual 1st back in 2013 the photo print industry just started to get its head around the fact that most printable photos originated on smartphones (“we need an app!” was the dominant chorus). 

• But soon photo print product vendors realized that was not enough. The challenge morphed into finding the truly print-worthy photos among the glut of photos consumers take on their smartphones “(hello AI curation technology!”) and making it dead simple to design and order photo print products on any device (“hello smart UX innovators!”). 

• While most of us still focus on providing the best possible mobile, curation and print product creation & ordering UX solutions, some are already moving towards tackling the next challenge – or opportunity – which is primarily economic in nature: how to successfully tap into the overall premiumization trends with the right photo print products and pricing? What are the ideal print products to offer and how do you price them for what segment of consumers? We look forward to seeing the demos and hearing the perspectives of 8 innovative presenters at our March 15 Visual 1st Photo Print App Innovation Spotlight – hope to see you there!

And a few more things...

Midjourney, Photoshop and not Nikon. At some point this will no longer qualify as newsworthy: A photographer who found Instagram fame for his striking portraits has confessed his images were actually AI-generated by using Midjourney and finetuning them with Photoshop (the creator, now with 35K followers, previously insisted his photos were taken with a Nikon D810).

VSCO. Taking baby steps towards a social network. VSCO is about to add several features to its collaborative galleries, called Spaces, which it launched last year. New features include enabling users to share text-based posts in Spaces (which doesn’t sound like much but is a rare departure from VSCO’s laser focus on visual art). The app will also begin letting users message one another regardless of follow status. Why these baby steps? “We were seeing people go to other platforms and kind of get blinded by the light there — you know, algorithms and ads,” says VSCO president Eric Wittman. “But we want to encourage people to actually stay on platform now and continue to engage with those people that you’re inspired by, that you’re curious to learn from [and] build that really true sense of community.”

BRIA. Shopify app. BRIA AI has joined forces with Shopify and launched BRIA AI Background Editor, which basically does what’s implied in its name and gives the products SMBs are selling through Shopify a professional look without the SMB-ers needing to have specific design skills.

EleutherAI Institute. Forming a non-profit when Open in OpenAI doesn't mean open. Community research group EleutherAI is forming a nonprofit research institute to share AI research insides and open source code. The EleutherAI Institute is funded by donations and grants from AI startups Hugging Face and Stability AI, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, Lambda Labs and Canva.

Partnership on AI. Responsible practices for synthetic media. The Partnership on AI launches framework to help guide the responsible development, creation, and sharing of synthetic media. The framework is supported by leaders in technology, media, and civil society in this effort, including launch partners Adobe, BBC, Bumble, CBC/Radio-Canada, D-ID, OpenAI, Respeecher, Synthesia, TikTok, and WITNESS. It outlines key techniques for developing, creating, and sharing synthetic media responsibly for 3 categories of stakeholders: Builders of Technology and Infrastructure, Creators and Distributors and Publishers.

Fujifilm. Fujifilm Instax Mini 12 instant camera. The newest edition of Fujifilm’s instant film camera features a new multi-function twist lens that lets photographers quickly power the camera on/off and enables its close-up mode. Additional usability improvements include automatic flash control, and higher image quality in especially dark or bright environments. But what if you want to share your photos digitally? Alongside the Instax Mini 12, Fujifilm has announced Instax Up!, a new smartphone app designed to make it easy to digitize instant film prints.

Prequel. Launching design app for SMBs. Consumer photo app developer Prequel launches Artique, an AI-powered “all-in-one advertising and marketing graphics platform” for businesses and creators using mobile devices.

Beamr. Gone public. Congratulations to Visual 1st alumni Beamr, who went public on Nasdaq.