Like it or not, midstock is going to happen. With more and more sites offering mid pricing for their RF collection ( mid being anywhere between more than $10 and less than $100), the offering is starting to flood the market.

LuckyOliver, Snapvillage ( Corbis), Getty’s $49, Punchstock, Zymmetrical.com, Moodboard, and many others are the first. Others will be following in line. There are enough images out there, of very good quality, that refuse to be micro but are still priced for budget conscious buyers. The market is mostly for the mid stock is mostly on line and will be flirting very closely with the RF footage that sits around $79 but yet currently still much more complicated to use.

Everyone trying to make money in the web industry is now  looking for the long tail, not the 20% that make the 80%. Its the volume game which is always somewhere between average and mediocre. And it affects pricing the same way.

Editorial is not far away. With newspapers starting to struggle to keep up, magazines starting to hurt, an attractive price is certainly very appealing.

Photoshelter’s upcoming collection is willing to flirt with a $50 minimum which is very low for an editorial usage. Alamy is willing to settle for less if volume compensates. With more and more smaller agencies being born out of resentment for the big ones, the offering is ballooning. More red carpet, more press conferences. Only the hard to get and dangerous places remain relatively  untouched. The rest is slowly following the price pressure.

Until everything will settle.  Commercial stock and editorial stock will first start to align itself with each other as image buyers will not understand the difference. RF will soon follow as standards in image size, DPI and pricing start appearing, mostly out of frustration from the buyers.

The settling price point ? Midstock.