BobPhoto

Alamy never wanted exclusivity, they added this dual commission structure as a way to get out of the outrage when they reduce commission to 40% for all... All my high value sales on Alamy are from images that are available elsewhere, but license might be different and justify the price difference.

While it's always better to get good exposure in camera, you could easily improve some images with better post processing by reducing highlight and opening the shadow. Spend some time on the millions of tutorial online to learn more. I would stop uloading until you get better results. There is a way to get the official lightroom and photoshop subscription for free if you upload images somewhere (send me pm if interested as it is link with alamy competitor).

In Jakarta as a foreigner (and local as well) we have to pay the full year in advance... And we get only yearly contract.

Sorry but you make no sense as you just said before that what is important for you is to get your images published, even for free, and now you say nothing under 50% is fair... There is no "objective fairness", for me it is fair that agency bring me enough money each month whatever the commission rate. I don't know if it was you who made the example about people refusing free money if the other one get more, actually in economic theory, this is an example of irrational thinking and a deviation of "homo economicus"...

It is interesting to see how people here see themself, mostly as suppliers. For me, I see me as a customer of the agencies I work with. They provide me a service that is to license my images and are paid by taking a commission. I don't expect to pay 30 usd to stay at Hilton and I dont expect to pay 250 usd to stay at the local crappy motel. I am also with the bigger tier 1 agency that most people hate here who pay me 25% on average. I am very happy to be with them as they provide me great service, i.e. selling a lot of my images. That's why they can propose such low commission levels. Pushing the argument to the extreme, I would not mind an agency to take 99% of sales value if they generate 5 millions of sales a year! However in this case, I don't believe that Alamy service price increase, i.e. lower our commission, is justified by a better service as I don't believe the measures they intend to do will bring significant higher sales. Would be glad to be wrong. It is like lowering the commission to pay for US office, now that it is done and sales increased according to them, they should bring back our 60%. It is also BS to me to lower our commission while they will not decrease their "charity" and dividend, this is why profits are done, to invest and to increase profits in the future. PS: I never understood why people here tough that Alamy was fair, nice and so on compared with others... PS2: I really would like to see geogphoto opening a microstock account and sell RF

While no comparison are perfect, it does give a good preview of the earning power of the two. My calculation considers the lower commission for the micro, so the difference is not that large as when comparing agency revenues. It always good to have numbers instead of just "dogmatic" opinions. Adding video in the number is not that unfair, as they do generate higher sales, they also require quite a bit more work than photos. My return per video per year is a few times more than for images, but need much more time to process and shoot them, at the end I feel they are equivalent in terms of working time.

And can be compared with a certain microstock company that is listed on the stock market, 0.08 GBP per file in Alamy vs 0.88 USD per file in this microstock with 260 mio files both based on commission paid and end of the year amount of images-file.

A directly interesting point for us is the repartitions of sales: 33% UK, Europe ex UK 17% and rest of the world 50%. Less UK centered than I would have expected.

My experience: Have been using LR since I got a digital camera maybe 12 years ago. Never wanted to use photoshop, and was very against their creative cloud renting scheme vs owning a stand alone version of LR. Well, I got a new computer, new lenses not supported by the last LR and decided to try the CC. I have to say that it is pretty good and I really feel stupid for not having used Photoshop earlier It is so easy and clean to remove people/logo with the stamp tool that it is saving me tons of time now for my commercial stock photo (mostly not here on Alamy). Really worth it in this case. Now If I were doing only editorial, I don't think the price would be worth it and might have kept a LR standalone.

your keywords are awful, that's going to kill your rank.. Your taj Mahal photo with Udaipur, Jaipur, Rajasthan, Poverty, kids, portrait, wildfile and so on as keywords... You not going to see sales soon...

While Alamy was always a low earner for me with less than 5% of my stock sales last year, I have already exceeded my total of 2017 in 2018 with quite a few nice over 100 USD licence, all sold as RF. Happy.

Got one last week, on of these new RF editorial licence!

Then why not including the name of the country in the description and keyword? They are all the same

I cant edit the caption box when it has reached its limit upon upload, very annoying as I have many picture with unfinished caption. 150 characters is too low as well, at least 200 would be good.

Not that many sales here, but I have just checked and 31% of my sales value have been made by 2 recent RF sales (out of a total of 35). These 2 RF were also my 2 highest sales, with only one RM above 100 usd. I have roughly 50/50 RF and RM photos in my port.