Keith Douglas

Great summary Kumar, sounds like it was a very useful meeting. Hope to get along to another meeting again soon. Keith

By page 10 it looks like all the images are from just one contributor!

It is a lot of hard work, and a long haul to get a reasonable income from stock on Alamy. Of course, it depends what you mean by a reasonable income! I reckon that on average I currently receive, net, about £0.15 per image that I have on sale per year. This ratio could be a bit higher if I eliminated similars, culled poor images (but which ones?), increased the proportion of News etc. But it might give you a basis for some ballpark estimates.

17 sales for $449 gross. Another 'Best Month Ever' for me, with lots of small value sales making up the numbers and one $$$ sale making up about 40% of the total $

Thanks for the spot Bryan. Was hoping that it might have made it into the print edition as well, but unfortunately not, although the text of the article was on the front page. Times 30th Keith Douglas A branch of the Clarks shoe shop in Penny Street, Lancaster, UK - Image ID: M66E64

They need to be a minimum of 3000 x 2000 pixels if they are in a 3:2 ratio. There's lots of other threads about minimum image size. Keith

I'm sure that they do chase up customers. But they aren't going to spend tens or hundreds or thousands of dollars on admin costs/ legal fees etc. to accelerate the payment of a fee that's tens of $ or less.

I'd rather know as soon as a sale is made. That way I can do a reverse image search straight away to find out any infringements. I've found them a couple of times - people copying images from newspaper articles to their blogs or using them on Facebook. If somebody is only earning $50 every 2 or 3 months, then I really don't think that a contributor just missing the $50 threshold should be on the list of priority items that Alamy needs to address. The answer is for the contributor to submit more quality images and make more regular sales!

I don't think you are doing anything wrong, but the competition is high! Take your shots of Barclays Bank in Bath. Search for Barclays Bank Bath. 7 images of which yours are 4 and 6. If you are a customer wanting an image of Barclays Bank in Bath to illustrate an article which ones are you going to zoom? If you want an image of people protesting against Barclays in Bath then the 6th image might fit the bill but the small image just doesn't say 'Protest' to me. Six months is not a long time to begin to see results, particularly with just 413 images. It was over 1 year before I saw my first sale, so you are way ahead. I just don't think there is any more to know about the search process that you could take action on.

Alamy aren't going to divulge exactly how their search algorithms work from a contributors perspective. Their priority, anyway, should be to refine their algorithms to give the customer the 'best' selection of images that meet the customer's search query. I suppose it's inevitable that contributors want to know the shortcut to getting their images at the top of the search list and zoomed by the customers. I don't think there is any secret key to it though. It's just a long term, steady process to have: Unique images, accurately captioned and keyworded that will get you on the first page of search results. A history of regular sales that will get your images on the first page of search results where many images match the customers search criteria. Strong and/or unique images that are accurately captioned and keyworded to get you zooms.

I uploaded 1360 images in 2018. It increased my total number of images by 21%

How do you know the images have not been viewed? As I understand it Alamy Measures only includes data from selected image buyers. I've just viewed all your images by the way ;-) Buyers may well have viewed them too, without you knowing.

2018 was my best year for revenue with Alamy to date. 81 sales for $2465 gross. Over the last 3 years my sales numbers have been relatively stable - around 80. Similarly, my gross revenue has been pretty stable at £2200 +/- 10% for the last 3 years as well. Over the last 3 years I've increased my number of images on Alamy by about 20% each year. A rate of increase that's easily achievable although I need to be careful about creating too many similars. All in all, a pretty good situation for me. The small value sales (<$10) are compensated for by 2 or 3 a month that are $50 or more, with the occasional $$$ sale maybe once a quarter. About half way through 2018 things didn't look quite so good, and I thought I would be struggling to achieve $2000 gross, but sales then picked up in the second half of the year. Let's hope that the upward trend continues in 2019! Keith

Best month ever for revenue, 8 sales for $423 gross, including one $250 sale, again my highest ever.

Sorry , I won't be able to make it today as I have family visiting here. It's all been a bit uncertain as I mentioned before so apologies for the late response. Keith