Tasks, challenges, missions, contests; whatever they’re called there’s a lot of them about. The stock world has seen an upsurge in models that are based around a ‘task model’. A company will post up a brief and invite photographers to submit work. There’s invariably a monetary reward if you ‘win’. Sometimes the companies may take more than one image but usually it’s winner takes all.
This approach has reared it’s head a few times in the past. Seattle based briefly flirted with success before disappearing. The costs and time associated with producing high quality work didn’t stack up against the likelihood of ‘winning’ the job. But then along came mobile and with it, good quality saleable work with an immediacy of creation that lends itself to task-based crowd sourced models.
App and web based mobile sourcing models such as EyeEm with it’s ‘Missions’, Snapwire and their ‘challenges’ and Scoopshot’s ‘tasks’, plus others, have all come to the fore and it’s easy to understand their popularity.
The appealing aspect is that it answers that perennial question for photographers: ’What do customers really want?’. With this business model the customer tells you upfront so it’s less of a wait-and-see game that you may have with stock.
, where business operations are given a competitive edge, is all the rage. Everyone loves to win and there’s clearly an enormous degree of satisfaction derived from just ‘taking part’. The task based photography model has that buzz.
It all sounds very sensible, and the general premise certainly is, but what’s the reality for the protagonists involved?
Let’s take a hypothetical example: Our customer is a global sports brand, they put out a task via a task based app to run for two weeks looking for images of runners in the early morning sun for a web based advertising campaign. The winner will get $100.
- For the Customer, they will get their global brand in front of a significant user base. Their task is quite cool and will further promote their brand identities. The cost for this mass marketing (and of course they also get an image for their campaign) is $100 plus whatever they have to pay for posting the task. Money well spent we’d imagine.
- For the app business, they get some brand boosting from their association with this cool global sports brand and they get a lot of user interest (everyone wants to have their image in an ad campaign for a cool brand).
- For the photographers, they get the thrill of the competition and $100, if, and it’s a big IF, they win.
Not exactly a win, win, win situation is it?
Tasks work when the following falls into place:
- The customer has lead time to wait for the imagery.
- The customer has the time and skills to put together a clear brief and submit the task.
- The photographers deliver the right images and the customer finds an image that fits the brief.
Smart businesses in this sphere are not basing their entire business around ‘tasks’ and that seems a wise route to take. The building of a community and the power that can bring is well understood and gamification fuels that end game as users become attached to apps without there necessarily being fiscal reward.
Tasks have value as a testing ground for your work and users who invest a lot of time can learn a lot about what the market wants, but ultimately it isn’t a good long term revenue strategy for the individual shooter. If you’re so good that you win all the contests, go out on your own and pitch for commissions. It looks like you’ll do OK and will no doubt be able to charge more than $100.
Task based businesses can thrive by not just basing it around the winners. Take the images that are the ‘overs’ that didn’t make it and you have a set of images for a real need that can fit nicely into stock. 17³Ô¹ÏÔÚÏß sells images that have come through Snapwire ‘Challenges’, a fantastic collection of work from the content that was not chosen during the Challenge.
Good photographers don’t need to be told what customers want, they invest time in learning and they are conditioned to absorb trends, styles, fads and fashions. Take part in tasks because, hey, it’s fun, but make sure your images go into stock where you’re in ‘The Game’ every minute of every day.