Survey - Artists Selling Models Online

There are some things to consider regarding the idea of paying upfront or annual plans.

First, it's hard to predict how many models are going to get sold annually on a new unfamiliar platform, therefore a percentage of royalty is a safer bet, especially when it is as low as here on CGtrader.

Also a system that enables better royalty's when users do well and stay loyal to the platform is more interesting + if the selling platform gets a percentage on a sale it will also guarantee full incentive to strive in maximizing sales from both sides.

On other hand when one would pay upfront via annual plan then that would create some sort of disconnect in this situation.

For example, suppose a user would select a +150 models plan because he usually sells +/-300 models a year on an established platform, the +150 models plan would cost him 250 dollars, but then in that following year the unfamiliar platform only manages to sell 50 models for some reason?

The user would have paid allot of royalty and the selling platform losses noting, that place would have collected the money regardless of the poor sales performance.

In short, it's probably better to opt for giving a percentage on a per model sale and 10 to 15% is a very good deal.

Hi iterateCGI, yes you make some common reasons why sites are as they are now. Which is exactly why I've polled this a bit to help assess other options. A platform with fixed fee would never get fees if it can't reach a wide enough audience or push some other incentives to help grow the reach to actually make selling models feasible. Some lower entry rates or even free trial period (like 1 year) would have to be considered to allow a new site to grow and extend its reach to so the fixed fee becomes worthwhile to the artist. The platform would only benefit if it can reach more subscribers, so advertising and growing the site is crucial. That is also a benefit to the artists selling, because more users, higher traffic helps to sell more models (if the right audience).

You have some points, on other hand it would be interesting to see a platform that is able to provide collaborative means for artists to work together, so some sort of a system that can automatically distribute a given percentage to the cooperative artists.

A platform that already works by handling percentages probably has better chances to evolve into this kind of system?

One advantage though of a fixed fee is that it can be reduced from taxes by writing it off as a business spending.

Thanks for the thoughts and for everyone's responses to this. Gives me more feedback to ponder, but there are certainly some tough roadblocks when it comes to market exposure and uptake of a new platform, when it would be launching from the ground up, might be too tough to enter the tight market, not quite sure yet, but I like the idea of some different models to attract and make things easier on the artist. Like no tax B.S., just a writeoff service fee. Maybe this needs to be combined with that concept of collaborative artists. Hmmm. Thanks everyone!