Nathaniel Noir

Haha! Literally just got a batch of low fee sales in today! Joy

That's good to hear. I can agree with that, editorial has brought in some of the lowest fees for me

Yes, I wouldn't say that the PU sales were ultralow, but more on par with editorial, just a bit surprised about the amount...

Hi everyone, So after the whole new contract ordeal I've reviewed and re-labelled my portfolio, but noticed that I'm getting an increased number of Personal Use sales, is anyone else experiencing this?

It's also appearing on my dashboard

This is indeed very worrying. We are kept in the dark about who the clients are(unless you regularly Google your name, then you will have some information) and how can we trust that we have the right info about the fees that are being paid. Incidentally I was googling for my Alamy pictures some 3 or 4 weeks ago, I found one of my pictures on the website of a well known auction house, the sale has not come through on my account yet. Then 2 weeks ago Alamy got in touch with me to lift restriction for that image so that the client could buy it. Obviously I already knew who the client was, but I w

I'm not surprised. I haven't uploaded anything new since the new contract announcement, been focusing on writing for my blog instead and it feels really good!

Regardless of what it makes them look like (I think we all have drawn our conclusions by now), it's much better to fix the problems now then wait and see and hope for the best for Alamy's sake. Before it's too late!

If they were not acting as an 'agent-like entity' queries from customers about usage or lifting restrictions would be going directly to us and what Alamy would be providing is a website to host images, storage space and perhaps a customer service for contributors and such. But because they are acting as a middleman here they are more like an agent than anything else, but one that doesn't have a personal relationship with contributors. If that's the case, it makes for an even stronger point - taking 60% commission for what exactly.

If they just want to be a selling platform they should seriously reconsider their commission to something more in line with that, like eBays 10%.

Well this has been an exhausting week and it is now pretty clear that this is not a conversation nor a negotiation. We can ask as many questions as we want, but all we have gotten back in return is generic and vague doublespeak answers. My takeaway is that Alamy doesn't care. We can chat about this to infinity, but at the end of the day actions speak louder than words and like others on here I will be taking my own actions, for starters with marking all my images as non-exclusive as soon as the new contract kicks in and refocusing my time from submitting new images here to other ve

Exactly, note the overall vagueness of the response "allow us to deal with some operational challenges", "we incur significant and rising costs", what operational changes, which significant costs?

Agree

I would say that self-promotion is not the same as giving away complimentary images to clients. And even if agencies do use contributor images to promote themselves it doesn't make it ok. If an agency had any sense of fairness or willingness to support their contributors I believe they would opt to pay for their self-promotional usage, even if it's a token sum to show appreciation. Of course it could be argued that the agency using contributor images for promotion of the business in places such as social media etc is for mutual benefit, but I still don't why they shouldn't offer some compensat

I've experienced ridiculously low sales licensed in perpetuity as well even though all my images are RM and find it extremely disrespectful. Let's say you're an Alamy employee and you signed a contract and expect to get paid a certain amount of money monthly/weekly/daily. These kind of sales are basically like going up to one of the employees saying actually we will pay you $1 for your work today, just because.