SmugMug: Quality Experience Wins Payers

After a dozen or so years, it's still darned tough to get people to pay for services online. Mobile -- no problem, but online it's always an uphill battle.

So it's great to see a company win payers with an outstanding consumer experience. Smugmug is just such a company.

Photography is a subject very near to my heart. I have more cameras than fingers at the moment, and I have always felt that the photo sharing experience online is a little lacking. I'm not focusing that statement on the share and print platforms like KodakGallery, Shutterfly or Snapfish. I am a KodakGallery loyalist and have been so since 2000, chiefly because I like the way they print stuff, and the print "oddities" that they sell that make photos more fun. I've spent more than $5K with them over the years I 'spect.

But it strikes me that the market had really stratified into fun, no frills experiences like Slide versus the photo printing sites. I draw a parallel to retail -- with Slide and Flickr being analogous to WalMart and Target. Higher up the ladder are the Gallery, Shutterfly, and Snapfish.

But it appears that is a still higher level, and SmugMug is right there more or less owning it. Smugmug is a pay site -- no free memberships available. Their technology really provides a very attractive format in which to showcase photos. With the choice of background display colors and templated pages, this is really on another level than an embedded widget.



With more than 300,000 payers (Price is $40 a year -- hardly a budget buster, but a significant revenue source) this site seems to be carving out a superpremium segment. More money can even get you pages without SmugMug branding -- just the thing for pro and semi pro photogs who wish to create their own proprietary environments.

For $40 you get to create a templated gallery page, bigger photo display, iPhone display capabilities, no ads, the opportunity to direct people to your page without making them register, group and community apps, and a bunch of other stuff. Each item small in itself but as a bundle very nice.

They also offer some interesting print options including something called Fotoflot, a glass free magnetic mounted printing option. Flot I suppose is supposed to be said float and not flot as in Aeroflot. 4x6es are 19 cents a pop -- I couldn't find whether it was Kodak, Fuji or Agfa printing. My guess is Fuji. Fuji has its fans, just like Kodak has its believers. 19 cents is higher than the classic print services, but not a BAD price by any stretch.

This site has clearly spent a lot of time on user experience. Very nice ways to browse and select photos for printing, as well as a public keyword environment to find photos that might interest you. Organization is worlds easier than some other sites. Which is to say, it reflects prevailing web technologies of today rather than yesterday. The site also showcases remarkable photographers in their midst, which is nice for people like me that would love more photo recognition.

The question in my head is...is this market headed to three tiers with the low end, the high end, and the long running brands like Gallery and Shutterfly getting squeezed in the middle? Like Sears and Penney's are in retail?

I don't think that is how things will play out. I am very happy that Smugmug exists, and there are certainly hundreds of thousands of people willing to pay for it. I see strong growth for them in the next months and years. But I also think that Kodak and Shutterfly and Snapfish can continue to fulfill a role for millions of people looking for a more quality experience than offered by disaposaphoto widget platforms, but not needing all the bells and whistles of a Smugmug.

It's really a question of a maturing market -- now large enough to support three tiers of quality and service.

Though I also think Kodak and Shutterfly and Snapfish need to get on with improving their services and adding more global sharing options and easier to use interfaces. No doubt they are working on it. It'd be good for that work to reach fruition ASAP. Kodak is making lots of statements about how their future is digital, as it clearly is. Part of being digital is being truly up to date. But in fairness, they have a much broader range of print options and for that I will stick with them and see what they come up with.

But Smugmug is really quite a site, and it's worth a look around if, like me, you spend a lot of time and money on photography as a hobby -- or indeed as a profession.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.