engleski

Free visual content: an open business model in the visual sector of the creative industry

From its inception until today, e-commerce survives in the market, continually evolving and establishing new business models. E-commerce is present in all sectors of the creative industry (CI). An offer of free products is one of the newer business models. The paper analyses the free e- commerce business model within the global visual content business as a product of one CI sector, based on commercial stock photography. Although three types of stakeholders (authors, customers, and intermediary agencies) are encountered in the model, only intermediary agencies as moderators and the connection between all stakeholders are investigated in the paper. The paper aims to determine the motives that encourage visual content authors to provide their authored works for free to intermediary agencies as stakeholders of the free visual content model. Data on intermediary stock photography licensing agencies were collected to apply the SWOT analysis of the free business model in the stock photography market. The data were collected by analyzing the content published on the websites of intermediary stock photography licensing agencies. The analysis focused primarily on identifying the types of free licenses offered and then on the level of realization when downloading free content. The main finding of the conducted analysis shows a sophisticated market- sustainable model in the background of the free business model, which is growing into a challenging alternative to existing models on the market. The study is partly limited by a lack of insight into financial indicators of the observed agencies. Future researchers of related phenomena recommend identifying additional secondary and primary sources of data that would enable an analysis of the sector of digital visual content as a component of the creative industry.

freemium model in e-commerce ; stock photography ; global market of digital visual content ; open model in e-commerce

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