I Want to Hear A Content Creator Perspective
nelsonsmith
Posts: 1,325
There seems to be this conflicting and very confusing back and forth that goes on from time to time, concerning sales and people who don't have a lot of money to spend vs content creators who one is led to believe are not being paid their fair share for the amount of time and effort that goes into making quality Daz content.
So which is it? I don't mind paying what something is worth, but when I discovered Daz, I wasn't necessarily examining the business model with a magnifying glass so much as just being amazed at this really fantastic software and simply taking it as it was presented, which includes grabbing discounts when they were presented to me.
If I'd never got involved in the discussion boards, I probably never would have questioned it, but now I see threads that say that the prices on Daz for items is too high, and other threads that say taking advantage of ridiculous sales are taking bread out of the mouths of the artists who make a living supplying this content.
I want to hear from creators, in order to know what side of the fence I'm on, since odds are I will probably end up being a creator down the line out of necessity, because I got out of the pin-up, semi-naked, gravity defying boob phase relatively quickly, and started seeing that my actual choices became much more slim and required amassing a lot of new skills in order to make things work. I'm definitely from the Harlan Ellison school of "PAY THE ARTIST", which I thought I had been, but now I'm not so sure.
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I've cut off the amounts that would be on the left of this chart (Those are between Daz, the IRS and me ;) ), but this gives you an idea of how different sales are when there are discounts. My store was put on sale the 22 of May (May is my birthday and Daz anniversary month). The sale lasted a couple of days. The rest of the month my store was at full price. Also, I did not have any new releases in May. So this is all back catalog.
The customer base has gotten so use to discounts, that there are very few sales at full price. This kind of buying makes a vendor think twice about the full price, so that they can offset the discounts, and expect a decent return of time invested in creating the product. (IMHO)
Thanks for that indication draagonstorm. Data can be interpereted a lot of different ways but that seems pretty relevant and clear in what it represents.
Nelsonsmith, I would say offsetting discounts with the full price would be an important consideration. I'm no PA but my impression is that once the discounted item sells, Daz takes 50% and the artist gets 50%. Given most products seem to be sold at 50% off or better, after their initial release period (and often much better), it might suggest 25% would be what the artist is getting for it at best after that introductory period.
I get the impression that an artist isn't going to create and sell much for long if they can't make that pay. They'll go look for something that will pay. Maybe some of them are doing this on the side for extra or just because it's a hobby they can make pay. But I don't think you need to worry about where you should stand. Daz offers the discounts and the artists sell knowing that. If you are buying, you are supporting the artists, regardless of the level of discount. I only imagine the artists would be happy for you to buy everything at full price but it is not in any way unreasonable for you to pay 70% less if that is what is being offered.
Let's say an item is, at full price, $10.00 USD.
Now, let's say that the vendor gets 50% of the sales, each time an item is sold.
So, if you buy my item (at full price) for $10.00, I will earn $5.00.
Now, let's say my store goes on sale - half off. Yay! Lots of rushes on the wishlist.
The $10.00 item, half off, is now priced at $5.00 for you.
At 50% sales commission, I earn.. $2.50 on that sale.
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I am not a PA here on Daz's site, but I've sold in a few other places here and there for several years - and that's how it's worked in any market I've ever sold at. So, yes. If the vendor wants a decent return on the hard work involved in producing the item, getting it through QA and into the store... then the base price ends up being set higher in order to off-set the steep cuts they'll be taking whenever the store or item is placed on sale.
My commission is going to be 50% of each sale, whether you pay $5 or $10 for the item. So a $10 item on sale half off, you paid only $5, and because I get 50% commission, I only earn half of what you paid, so that $10.00 item only generates a $2.50 profit for me.
This is standard practice in most stores, I think, though again - I want to stress - I can not speak for Daz specifically because I do not sell here. I can only speak from what I have experienced in every other market I've sold at, and this is pretty much the SOP for most markets. The percentage commission might vary, but the basic SOP remains the same... you earn your commission on the dollar amount that has been sold, and items on sale for cheap to you also means my commission amount takes a hit as well. Higher prices for "regular" price by vendors are generally an attempt to make sure we get at least a little something in return for the amount of work we put into our products.
Once you tack onto the issue the fact that many consumers will not pay full price for any item, and thus, the "regular price" for the item is rarely ever sold, you then further compound the issue. Now my prices have to go up even higher, so that my "half off" sale periods don't kill me completely. If I want to earn a minimum of $5 on that sale, I have to set the regular price at $20, so that the "half" sale for you is $10 and I will then and only then bring in the $5 profit I was hoping for.
Hope this helps explain a bit. DraagonStorm's chart is very good, but I figured some actual numbers might also help for those that are more numerically inclined.
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For myself, I am not paying my bills on my 3D commission. My commissions are basically just to off-set my habit. :) So personally, it's not going to bother me if I only earn a $2.50 profit on something. I do this because I have fun with it, I enjoy it, and I like seeing other people enjoy it. But if I was trying to put food on my table and pay my bills off of 3D, my prices would be much higher, yes. For me, this is a hobby, but for a vendor who is keeping food in their kitchen on their 3D income, there's a lot more at stake.
Thanks everybody. This is all very enlighting.
Personally, the only way I'd consider doing 3d work is strictly from a hobbyist perspective. The money is not even close to 'worth' the work.
That said, if some of the recompense is simply having fun doing what you are doing, it changes the balance.
For example, I do art commissions for friends. What I charge them is ludicrously low, but A) it's an amount that they can and will engage in, and B) since it's not 'enough' I can afford to be picky and only deal with them, as I have time, because it's not like I could live on it.
Fair enough, but I'm curious as to whether the line represents the number of items sold or your revenue from those sales.
That would be Dollars
Revenue
Thanks, the distinction between sales and revenue is useful to know in these types of discussions.
Deep discounts leads to less income which eventually leads to less production.
I don't mind shelling out big bucks for something that is super duper well made especially if I need it urgently, and I have purchased items at regular, non-discounted prices only because I need to have it at that moment. I draw the line when the product, in my opinion, does not look well made, is a copycat of another product by another artist for which it offers little or no improvement, or is just well overpriced for what it offers. Not that I can recall the products at this moment, but just this year alone there have been some new products rolled out (here and at other sites) that made me go "hmmm...for something as simple as this, they are charging way too much".
I'd be looking carefully at where the maximum revenue occurs in the life of an item, and be focussing pricing strategy on that.
If, as is often said by PAs here, the (ultra) maximum occurs during the first days of release, then I'd set a price (best balance of sales vs revenue) for that period and let the back catalogue take care of itself.
However, if there are significant back catalogue sales to be made then the revenue from those becomes an important consideration.
My guess would be that the more new customers DAZ brings to the store, the more relevant back catalogue becomes.
Except then you run into the difficulty of finding stuff in the back catalog.
I agree that the money one might make (unless sales numbers are outside the range I estimate) likely wouldn't compensate for the hours of work that go into making a costume. So love of the game is the reason I've always done 3D. I've never been a PA though, so I'm speaking strictly from guesswork.
That's where the sales promos come in. The items in the PAs' back catalogues are brought to the front
pagesof the store again.With sufficient new customer intake, I'd bet back catalogue revenue would be not insignificant to a PA like Stonemason.
When I see an item I really liked, I tend to automatically look at the entire catalog of that particular PA, and generally end up buying a lot of those items if not then, then they go on the wishlist so that I can always be reminded of them for when I do have the ready cash. I'm assuming new customers are always being introduced to Daz, so the relevance of a high quality back catalog can't be overlooked.
Also when new customers decide to get deeper into Daz, i.e. texturing, shading and the like, a lot will discover that just because something was made for V4 or genesis doesn't mean it's obsolete, or will automatically look terrible.
Best sales/income on products continue to be during the intro period. When I started as a PA that period really did run for about 2 weeks. Not it tends to all be packed into the first 3 days of sales. There are rare..really rare.. super rare.. situations where later a product make sale well enough in volume to be really noticable up tic for that produc. But, those sales are almost always on at a painfully huge discount so the income isn't going to be anything to crow about.
The problem that PA's have mentioned over and over is people tend to avoid buying back catalog stuff at full price so the PA is getting a discount of a discount of a discount with the added bonus of low sales since people tend to buy for the latest charaxters first, rather tedious customer support since the product is not designed to work in modern versions of software, damage to reputation (Stonemason has pulled old products because thier quality is not up to snuff). Unless a vendor reall needs a loss leader, they have not found this to be useful.
Back when I started buying, in 2006 or thereabout, there would be one or two new items a day or a cluster of semi-related items once or twice a week; now we get six to ten items roughly five times a week. So the 'new' only lasts days, not weeks. I would hope that the number of sales in that intro period has gone up from an increased customer base, but I'm willing to bet that real revenue is down - not enough new customers to counterbalance the shorter 'sweet spot' in sales.
Couple that with the cost of living going up, and a PA has two choices: churn out more items in a given period of time or raise prices. Trying to get more quality items out in the same number of days leads to longer hours per day and an effective hourly pay cut; at some point, serving up hamburgers or coffee starts to look like a better way to make a living. So prices are going up.
Face it, DAZ has us conditioned. We know there will always be another sale - and if we wait long enough, a better sale. List price is a bit of a myth and the only reason to spend that much on anything is because the customer is actually doing a commisioned work and needs the item to complete the project (and should have the item price 'baked' into his or her fee).
To partially counter this, DAZ has been selling money (gift cards) at a discount more frequently and at larger discounts. This has three effects. First, DAZ gets the money up-front, helping cash flow. Second, this effectively discounts the sale price by an additional stacking percentage - but it does not affect the PA revenue stream. If the list is $18 and the intro price is $12 the PA will get $6. If I purchase that item with a gift card or store credit that was a 10% discount, I'm actually paying $1.20 less, so the PA still gets $6 but DAZ effectively gets $4.80. And the third effect (it hits me, I can't be the only person that does this
) - the customer has already spent the money and has this store credit burning a hole in his or her pocket, so something new comes along, and "what the heck - looks good and I've got a store credit" - and bam into the cart it goes.