regen

"The disconnect is between those of us who were there in the film days and earned solid livings from stock and those who entered in the digital age and see it as a nice hobby. " Spot on Brian. Started in 1991 and made a very good living from gardening and wildlife stock which increased through to 2000 as i developed direct selling to mags and book publishers. More than held my own by scanning about 20000 medium format trannies between 2000 and 2005 before finally moving to digital with the advent of the Canon 10D in 2006. then came the tsunami which was accelerated by the financial crash and never recovered. Gave up stock photography some 5 years ago but at least its all "profit" now -all be it at about 10% of what was expected.

Alamy do seem to be assisting with the race to the bottom averaging 17.92 dollars gross per sale for me this year. This is in part due to genre and their need to attract bulk deals at absurdly low prices and giveaway licence conditions. But there are still reasonable prices out there if the agency is prepared to work at it. If only they could match one of my specialist agencies which averaged 35.84 pounds gross per sale this year then it would be worthwhile getting out there again. Regen

Nothing humorous about discarded plastic!

My specialist agencies in both wildlife and gardening genre consistently sell 5x what alamy does value wise with probably 20% of the files on line but they are curated and often only accept 10% of what i send them. Again they are all RM and often contact me to ensure that i have not sold a particular file elsewhere.

whilst they are prepared to licence images to a multi national magazine publishing co. for around 5 dollars then a dollar for student use seems expensive!!!!

The site is so big and the numbers so large that the stats of an individual are unlikely to allow any meaningful predictions. It may be possible to gain an inside track if you are a niche photographer who happens to know editors and pic researchers who then look at your collection first and if there is anything suitable then they use it but they don't always have to zoom it. However if you are in that position then why give Alamy 50%? Bottom line -its only sales stats that mean anything the rest is just Alamy tinkering around the edge rather than concentrating on the important things like ensuring prices,licences and uses are in sync.

I am probably not typical-largish specialist collection,no files with green discoverability,no submissions for about 5 years but payout every month. My CTR seems to yo yo between about 0.55 and 1.1 on an almost monthly basis but the ratio of sales to zooms remains fairy constant at 1 to 3. i think that as my CTR rises then I get more views,zooms and sales but as the views increase they become less relevant and so the CTR drops and the views and zooms drop but become more relevant and CTR starts to rise. This may be a consequence of very minimal keywording.

You need to check out the DACS site if you want to claim direct. 1. You will not be able to claim for all sales in 2020 -only those upto the date specified by DACS 2. You can claim for all qualifying sales prior to that date regardless of when they were published. It does not matter which agency was used or wether you supplied direct.

Tragic- Keith only lived 30 miles away and we compared notes back. in 2007 when we both joined Alamy before he made such a success. I am sure he will be greatly missed in the local community and beyond.

Just passed the $50000 ($50384)The bad news its dollars,gross and took 820 sales to do it.

over 20,000 published 1990-2010(own direct sales) -not bothered to update since then. Have Issn/isbn for about 15000 but only around 8000 actually figure on the list. DACS payment mainly from mags as about 300 book licences only yielded an extra couple of quid-I don't really understand the system either!

direct claim down on last year but still a 4 figure payout.

I dont restrict but feel that common sense and good business sense is somewhat lacking at Alamy as they tend to adopt a rather laid back approach to handing out our files. Its not only the price but the fact that a personal use file can be refunded without any proof whatso ever that it has not/will not be used. If somebody buys a file for personal use then they should know wether they need it or not and the conditions should make it clear that a refund is not possible.

I would start with AG because its a weekly mag but alamy only report sales monthly so could have been used across 2 or 3 issues. Regen

For Alamy i don't think 6 months is out of the way- Some of their disributors take longer than that to report a sale! Some publishers particularly books and calendars have very long lead times and even longer credit lines so it could be more than a year before you are clear of distribution always assuming the distributor actions Alamys request.