Brian Yarvin

Ian, of course there were thousands of "bitters." Most jumped into micro as quickly as they could and their younger counterparts are now flooding the free sites. And Peebert? Even I forgot about him. John; if my average sale at Alamy were even half of forty two dollars, I'd do nothing else but contribute.

Ian, I've understood, but I'm not sure how many others have. As I recall, it was indeed presented as "tapping into a new market." And it did just that. The only problem was that it turned off the old market to stock. Yet another unmentioned dynamic here is the fact that back around 1998, only a tiny portion of people who wanted to be represented by stock agencies were able to achieve this. Certainly, early RF vendors were aware of this and knew they could sign collections that were almost as good and languishing as the majors of the time sought to protect their turf. I

Ian, here's where Duncan's logic fails. What happened in the early two thousands wasn't a flood of equivalent quality images - it was a flood of poor quality images at far lower prices. Soon the lower quality stuff pushed everything else out including the buyers who were will to pay good money. As I've seen, they're still out there, but only reachable to those in major markets with appropriate portfolios. Twenty five years ago, stock was the top of the market in both quality and price, today it's a dismal bottom. Those of us who worked in stock photo agencies in the eighties and ni

Ian, I have not complained about the ten cent sales - indeed, I've noticed that they've really improved my stats and I appreciate this. As for the micros. When I started, I saw that the big users of my photos were going to them and didn't care that I wasn't there. And when I did submit? For the first few years, my revenues really jumped. And then something else happened - something that's almost never mentioned here - they started sourcing individual images from free sites. Today, more than ninety percent of individual image usages are from free sites; our challenge is to convinc

Yes, I get them all the time. One famous site has ten cent fees regularly.

Some of us remember another way of earning "Brownie Points;" making a personal impression on actual human picture researchers. Alamy's digital ranking system is pretty awful in my mind, and yet, it's far better than anything else I've ever experienced. I would rather have my micro-priced sales counted towards my rank than feeling like I have to visit headquarters and leave boxes of chocolates for the researchers. (something that always made sales spike back in the eighties) These sales we've been discussing have been part of my stock photo reality since I first got involved in the

I knew that.

More coffee!

Carlo, I named the US and the UK as shorthand for the creative commercial stock photographers who did their best work in New York and London. During this time, there was plenty of stock photography being sold all over the world - it's just that most of it was being produced by a handful of people in those two cities. At the same time, cities like Milan, Paris, and Tokyo had energetic and exciting photography worlds too, but they weren't producing the volume and quality of stock photography that New York and London were. On a personal note, I almost wound up moving to M

Rob, this is how stock photography has devolved from being the place where you could find the most creative work from the best talent - and that includes actors and models - to what we have today. What amazes me the most is that the buyers are still there and spending money - just not on stock.

Being in Asia or Africa makes more difficult to create lifestyle images that American and British editors and art buyers can relate to. There is a generally accepted working definition of "diversity" in mass media and it's clear that the Alamy sales team wants to work in that market. Let's not stand in their way.

John: I've been to a fair number of stock photography conferences and workshops and can assure you that this is absolutely NOT the case. Many specialties in professional photography are quite diverse, just not stock. And "where do they get all those white people from?" is a common bit of ridicule I here from buyers - or more likely - former buyers who've given up on stock. Let's face it, the only real way to solve the diversity problem is to get sales up to a level that allows photographers in the USA and the UK to be able to hire some of the great diverse models that

I too am relieved to hear that you're out, about, and doing fine.

Chuck, you're bringing up a super important question; why do so many photographer think that studio and set-up images need fewer keywords and poorer captions than other categories?

Now there's a dose of nostalgia! We should be serenaded with violins while reading a sales report like that one. Thank you so much for posting this.