Ask HN: Starting Up A Stock Site?

2 points by cianestro 15 years ago | 3 comments

I've been asked to make a stock media site that would hypothetically sell top quality stock video footage, VFX, pictures, audio, and music for fractions less (bare minimum and all original/legitimate) than current competitors. All artists would earn at least 50% from their content versus only <= 20% at best. All sales would be royalty free and there is already a good team of artists who have "signed up" and some are currently generating content as I speak. From what I understand it would be just your typical upload/download gallery to start out with and there would be a filter for professional content. Later on it might expand into new territories. Other than this limited bit I don't know much.

So my question is 1) What would I be getting into here? 2) Roughly, how expensive is it to run a stock site from beginning to end? 3) What would you want to see in a future stock site (programmers and artists alike)?

Thanks for your time.

jashmenn 15 years ago |

This sounds like a great idea.

There is a lot of competition, but don't be afraid of that. You probably can undercut in price and at the same time increase commissions to content creators.

I would guess S3 is going to be the cheapest in terms of storage and bandwidth. Lets say you're storing 1TB of video, uploading 50GB/mo with 5TB downloads per month. Then you're looking at around $900/mo in expenses ($800 of that is in bandwidth).

cianestro 15 years ago | |

Thanks, this was the type of answer I was looking for. S3 definitely sounds affordable. I knew bandwidth would get expensive but had no clue exactly how bad.

kljensen 15 years ago |

You would be getting into a very crowded market with large network effects and economies of scale.

Your skills may be more fruitfully applied elsewhere.