Hiring an Event Photographer in NYC
Meatpacking District for Pandora Jewelry - Joe Jenkins Photography 2018
How do people hire photographers in NYC?
This sounds like a silly question, but is a serious one. How does the average consumer find an event photographer to work their private function?
I ask this as I feel said average consumer is hesitant to reach out to a freelance photographer (or freelancer in general) and inquire manually about services - ie emailing/calling. We live in an age and an era where each and every industry available has a company/start-up (such as thumbtack, or gigsalad, or god-forbid snappr) that introduces people and vendors to one another (for a fee, of course). As a result the vast majority of service-oriented purchasing decisions that, once relegated to phone calls and emails, now occur via a button-click. A person signs up to a site, is presented with a list of freelancers, and makes a decision via that channel. The site that makes the introductions as well provides the consumer with a level of safety, as the site will tend to be a large brand and offers the illusion of a safe endorsement.
“Hey, we’re a billion dollar company. We endorse this guy. Feel safe” is the message.
Additionally, even though the consumer has technically gone to just one site or service, they as well feel they’ve done their due diligence in making their purchase.
Say, for instance, someone puts out a quote request on Thumbtack. Thumbtack looks at the vendors it has in its database capable of fulfilling that consumers request, and then presents them on a webpage or in an app. If there are five of those vendors, and the consumer chooses one, he/she will simultaneously feel they’ve also weighed a number of choices and purchased responsibly (despite, once again, that all of those choices came from a single source).
The Best Photographers are not on App Services
The irony of this method for hiring someone of course is that the people that inhabit these sites tend to be not as capable as the ones that are able to acquire business using the traditional methods. You have to ask yourself, if this person cannot acquire business/survive for him or herself without having to have a startup get it for him/her and for either a massive fee or by forcing them to work at an absurdly low rate, how good can this person then be?
Party at the Skylark - Joe Jenkins Photography 2016
Thumbtack, for instance, is a site that I used to use prior to them charging outrageous amounts of money for their services (their pricing very literally went up 500%+ in certain genres of my field) . My relationship with them came to an end when they attempted to charge me $82 in order to connect with one person. As in, someone was shopping for a photographer, went on thumbtack, was led along their hiring path into clicking ‘interested’ on my profile, and then charging me close to $100. For one person.
That’s insane
Snappr, on the other hand, in my opinion essentially takes freelancers that cannot survive on their own and places them in a directory and then forces them to work at rates that are around 60-70% lower than the industry standard.
I’m not about to ask the following question because I’m salty over them or anything. I just want you to generally ask yourself why would a person be on a site like this in the first place.
Do you think people want to work with the above companies? If my rate was, say, $200/hr as a photographer, would it be my dream to only be able to get business through a company that forces me to sell my services at a massive discount because they want to provide to the consumer something as cheaply as humanly possible.
Of course it wouldn’t, and that’s why you won’t find the top talent on any of the hiring sites such as this.
Email is Sort of Dead, Maybe?
I ask this as I look at my web traffic and see a retinue of visitors, many of which will view multiple pages on their visit (my main portfolio, and then my event portfolio, and then my about portfolio, and then my contact page) but then eventually exit prior to any sort of contact being made.
I’ve always found this somewhat strange, as my view to contact rate when I was on sites like the aforementioned was always extremely high, and I can’t help but wonder if things have shifted in such a way where the consumer has become unable to have a conversation with a freelancer that resides outside the boundaries of an upstart tech company looking to wedge a service fee in between vendors and consumers.
I’ll continue to change my pages and how people interact with them and see what happens. In the meantime, feel free to drop me a line.
I do find that people looking for corporate event photography tend to be a little more versed in actively reaching out to freelancers via email and either requesting quotes or simply making a basic inquiry about services. Granted, it’s their job to do so and, and in many ways finding the right photographer isn’t an option so much as a requirement (whereas hiring one for, say, your birthday party is).
This being said, however, I do feel that the private, consumer market is a little more ‘quote averse,’ in that if given the opportunity, people would rather have their options presented or pushed to them, like freelancers in a shopping cart, prior to making their purchasing decision.
