About 10 years ago, I had the chance to go to Aus­tralia as a Peo­ple To Peo­ple stu­dent ambas­sador. While I was there, I got to hold a koala and pur­chased the sou­venir photo to show all of my friends and fam­ily when I got home. As I was check­ing out, the pho­tog­ra­pher said they could also email the pho­to­graph to some­one if I liked, for free no less. I was blown away at the time. All of us were just cre­at­ing our first email addresses to share with other ambas­sadors like col­lege grads are now flock­ing to cre­ate LinkedIn accounts.

Ten years later, why doesn’t every­one do this as a cour­tesy or even as part of their busi­ness model?

Roller coast­ers, tall build­ings, and places with ani­mals like zoos and aquar­i­ums are noto­ri­ous for putting you in a line after you paid admis­sion so they can take your pic­ture to sell to you as you exit. I hate the expe­ri­ence. I’m not inter­ested in var­i­ous sizes with cus­tom mattes and key­chains. What I would be inter­ested in is a dig­i­tal copy that I could reuse, edit, and redistribute.

The Minus5 Ice Lounge charges $18 per photo that you can down­load from their web­site. I bet they don’t sell a lot of pho­tos, if any. What’s worse is that we actu­ally bought two actual pho­tos at the lounge for close to $30 and they wouldn’t give us a dig­i­tal copy. I’m not an econ­o­mist or even that great with num­bers, but I would have to think they could ben­e­fit from the long tail with a more aggres­sive pric­ing strategy.

Take the suc­cess of dig­i­tal music and apply it to sou­venir pho­tog­ra­phy. Peo­ple used to, and some still do, pay for the phys­i­cal good at a pre­mium, but now a lot more peo­ple pay frac­tions for the dig­i­tal copy. There’s no need for DRM since each photo is unique and redis­trib­ut­ing doesn’t lose the “artist” any royalties.

KEEP IT SIMPLE STUPID

You don’t need some e-commerce store to sell indi­vid­ual pho­tos. If they were stock pho­tos, that’s another story, but these are indi­vid­ual, unique pho­tos of fam­i­lies, grand­par­ents, and the occa­sional teenage cou­ple filled with blinks, blurs, and awk­ward smiles.

I’m con­vinced email would be the best way to dis­trib­ute the pho­tos. Add a water­mark in the cor­ner before send­ing if you want them to know you took the pic­ture. Offer a 10% dis­count if the cus­tomer allows you to add their email address to your mail­ing list. Keep back­ups of the pho­tos for 30 days just in case some­one acci­den­tally deletes the pho­tos or your email gets bounced because their inbox is full.

Instead of billing for each photo or set of pho­tos, you could alter­na­tively build it into the price of admis­sion. For an extra $2 a head, you’ll email a free photo to them (and you can still include fine print on the ticket to sign them up for newsletters).

Maybe I’m wrong and peo­ple are still over­pay­ing for cheesy sou­venir pho­tos which is why touristy spots aren’t that inter­ested in sell­ing more pho­tos. This sort of model isn’t lim­ited to touristy spots though. Any social spot could hire a pho­tog­ra­pher to snap a cou­ple hun­dred pic­tures a night, upload pre­views to their site, and then charge 10 cents a shot for their vis­i­tors to down­load the next morning.

Another twist on dig­i­tal sou­venirs is the Gowalla items model. Users find value in those free col­lectible icons. Either Gowalla and the like are going to cash in on that inter­est or the places of inter­est are. Just watch.