My fiancee’s sister just finished a marathon the other day. I believe it was a half-marathon which is approx 13 miles. By the way, that’s insane. If I run 3 miles I’d probably fall over. Nevertheless, I noticed on their stack of mail today a nicely printed advertisement for marathons. So, I decided to take a quick look. The funny thing about this is – it was her. This company called MarathanFoto has photographers at the race (I’m guessing) and they take photos of runners at different stages throughout the marathon. They do all of this without telling the runners. They then correlate the photos for each runner, get the runner’s contact information and send them sample prints. She received 3 sample photos – which looked pretty good. In the end, she wound up buying some of the prints. Why am I mentioning all of this? Because it’s a great business model and idea. Even her mother bought some of the photos. I was on a Carnival Cruise a few years ago that essentially did the same thing. Took a million pictures (professional) of you throughout the entire cruise and you had an option to buy at the end. Basically, these companies lose money on the large volume of pictures they take, but make out when they markup the photos that people do buy. And I would bet a good percentage do buy pictures. An intermediate model, that would reduce the costs for these companies would be to keep the draft photos online instead of wasting money on prints and shipping. Although you do have storage costs I would think they are lower. There probably could be an argument that they would lose some of their customers by not printing them. Maybe or maybe not. Overall, this seems like a pretty cool service. Check it out.
