How to build an empire..

June 14, 2008 by pmelcher.

$54,000 ?… “Advertisers pay as much as $54,000 to run a one-day ad package on the site.” says the LA times article on Perezhilton.com. It is already a known fact that some agencies now license images to that site, in full knowledge of its past infringement and the current lawsuit. What is less known is that those images are licensed for a mere $50 or so. Some of these agencies are probably also screaming about microstock and  its low balling prices.

PerezHilton.com is not a small one person operation anymore. It is well staffed. It receives 7 million pages/view a day. A day ! that is 7 times the amount of readers that people magazine gets in a week. With a licensing system like gumgum.com, at .20 cents per one thousand views, that would be $1,400 per day/per image.

Yet, they pay much, much less for images.

When are photo agencies going to wake up ? Perezhilton.com, without photographs would not and could not exist. It is all about displaying photographs. Yet, they set the pricing rules and not the opposite. It is insanity.

Most say, “it’s for the publicity”.” If you sale an image to PerezHilton.com, it sells better elsewhere”. Why not pay them to publish your image, if you really believe that ? at $54,000 a pop.

There is no excuses for these ridiculous prices besides professional ineptitude. It is not the market’s fault if prices are falling, it is due to the incompetence of certain and their misunderstanding of the laws of pricing. It is due to the stubborn idiocy of some that believe that  a sale, any sale is better than nothing. No other businesses function like that. Imagine going to Tiffany’s and saying,”I will only pay $50 for that diamond necklace because, after all, I know a lot of people and when I wear it, I will tell them I got it from you”

Nike, Addidas, Canon, Sony, practically any company make you pay to advertise their product. People buy T-shirts with the brand displayed in big letters. Cameras have logo on them. It is almost impossible these days to leave a store with a product that does not carry the manufacturers name in big on it. And no one gives a break.

No one, no one goes to a clothing store and say: “I will wear your T-shirt that says Nike on it if you sell it to me for $1..”.Not even those that license images for around $50.

Yet, the photo agency world does it. At least some of its players.

At $54,000 a day on advertising, one should think PerezHilton.com can pay more than $50 an image. Especially when the site does nothing else but publish images.

Mario Lavandeira, the real person behind the site, “debuted a clothing line, sold exclusively at retail chain Hot Topic, last week. He also appears in a summer movie, “Another Gay Sequel: Gays Gone Wild,” hosts a syndicated radio show, is writing a book on celebrities and is in talks to start his own record label. “I want my own little empire.” ”

And he will succeed thanks to the helpful hands of some challengingly impaired photo agency people ( you know who you are)  who think they are outsmarting their competition by underselling. Or, hopefully, he will have to use the money he saved to pay for his blatant copyright  infringement of X17 and INF images.

Full article on Perezhilton.com here

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