The Democratization of Content
The price of content is going down. And it isn’t declining slowly. What brands will pay for when it comes to photography, as well as various other kinds of content like writing and video production, is shrinking at a precipitous rate.
For one, it would be impossible to fill an Instagram feed with the amount of images that brands need for daily and twice-daily posts. Secondly, there’s the matter of supply: Suddenly, everyone's a photographer, partly because everyone has an Instagram and because digital cameras and publishing tools are becoming more affordable and accessible. What’s more, Instagram and plenty of other social media publishing platforms have enabled people to anoint themselves as photographers, which was a title you previously could only get through gatekeepers.
And as a function of that broadening group, there’s an influx of people who are willing to work for cheaper to establish themselves and make both a name and a living. Maybe five years ago, you could get on Instagram, post a few decent photographs, accrue several hundred thousand followers, and make a living being either an influencer or being hired by brands for your talents. Now, however, many people have to establish themselves as different from the pack in other ways. One of the easiest ways of doing that is offering lower prices for high-quality content, so that a brand that is cognizant of their budget would be enticed to hire them.
There’s also the fact that because technology is better, but also because I think out of necessity, perhaps people can sort of do a shoot completely by themselves. One of our top videographers, for example, comes up with the ideas, shoots, and edits, and he has a mastery of lighting, sound, color grading, and FX. He is a one-stop shop, and can do, from end to end, what entire teams had previously been hired to do. There's a flattening of what big advertising would call the TV village, which is the crew needed to pull off a big shoot. Brands that don’t have large budgets can now hire creators who can increasingly perform every function of creating content from start to finish.
And then there’s the images themselves, which often have a shorter life span. Execution is also less important. Coupled with the rise in the quality of equipment, and suddenly the gap is narrowing between an everyday person doing a decent job, and a whole crew doing their absolute best with world-class equipment.
This democratization is mostly good, because brands can then take the same amount of money they would have spent on one massive shoot and spread it around by hiring more people. Certain photographers or entities are very vocal about wanting to keep the cost of content high, but that would immediately shut out other people vying for work. If there are 40,000 photographers on The Hub and brands posted fewer jobs, 30,000 to 35,000 of those photographers would never get work.
To be clear, my platform doesn't price content. The Hub is simply a conduit and a meeting place for supply and demand, the same way that Craigslist and Airbnb don’t price the listings themselves. In reality, someone — in this case, a brand — decides how to price their job. Then, someone else — otherwise known as a creator — chooses whether or not to accept that price. It's a free market, and the market goes where it wants to go.
Right now, I think it’s very possible that a relatively talented photographer can make a good living through the kinds of shoots we have on The Hub. We regularly host shoots that go for $750 or $1,000 dollars apiece, and photographers might do eight shoots a month. That's two shoots a week, which translates to a day or two of prep time, one day of shooting, another day or two of prep time, and another day of shooting. Once you remove the processing fees, that's $96,000 a year and is almost double what the average photographer traditionally makes. That's not a terrible life.
The democratization of content enables a tier of creatives who wouldn’t have been able to make a living prior to platforms like The Hub. Most of the photographers we're helping are 22 to 28, and might be working a fast-food job to make ends meet. We're enabling them to instead make a few thousand dollars a month on our platform, which I would argue is better if they love photography as much as they say they do. I'd say that's a win, even if it means that some of the top one percent of photographers have to redistribute some of that money down.
The average rate of a shoot on The Hub right now is $813. By contrast, I know several platforms that pay a hundred bucks a shoot. If a photographer picks up five shoots worth $100 each, now that photographer is making $500 a week, which translates to $24,000 a year. That's not a living. That's predatory and problematic, and it typically affects the quality of the end product. I liken it to factory farming, which takes the creativity and dynamism and soul out of photography, which is quite central to the art form.
Sure, you may ultimately be looking at these images on Instagram or Facebook, but you still want to avoid mechanizing the process and turning photography into a soulless machine. I’m interested in retaining the soul and creativity of photography, as well as establishing a clear pathway to a sustainable living. If the market is fair and people are opting in from both supply and demand sides, photographers can make not just a living, but a good living. And brands who are getting content are happy because they're getting it better, faster, and cheaper. I view that as a win all around — so perhaps the lowering cost of content isn’t such a dangerous thing to anyone at all.