Search the Community

Sorry folks, this is another of my what's changed since I was active posts. I've done a search of the forums and read a few interesting posts suggesting that pseudonyms are no longer independent of each other. When I was active and submitting regularly the general thinking was that it was good practice to split the images into different pseudonyms because it meant that an unpopular pseudonym wouldn't drag down a popular one. At the time I started creating a new pseudonym for each country of the world I had photographed, each region of the UK, and in the case of models one for each model I'd shot. Since then I've travelled to many more countries and worked with many more models and my list of pseudonyms not runs to over 60!! The fact that I had so many pseudonyms didn't really bother me - 60 is just a number, and until I read the recent posts I believed it was a good idea to continue to keep them separate - let each collection fend for itself and in the gladiatorial arena that is Alamy Rank. However now with the theory that the pseudonyms are somehow linked in the ranking algorithm, I wondering if I ought to consolidate back down to smaller number. When I set up the pseudonyms it was round the time that we all used the BHZ keyword (and yes we called them keywords not tags in those days) to get an idea of relative ranking. As things stand at the moment I have one pseudonym "Ian M Butterfield (concepts)" that ranks on page 5 out 30+ pages. The rest are languishing between 1/2 and 2/3s down the listing. Some of the newer pseudonyms don't have any images with a BHZ tag, so I don't know there they fit into the grand scheme of things. I can already think of one big reason for consolidating. The Alamy measures info is VERY misleading with a lot of pseudonyms . Because I have a relatively low number of images in each pseudonym (Average of just over 115 per pseudo) it can give odd results. If I look at the the CTR for "Ian M Butterfield (Canada)" over the period 1 Jan 17 - 28 Sep 17. it has a CTR of 25.0 - wow! thought, until I delved deeper. Over that whole 9 month period, there were only two searches resulting only 4 views and 1 zoom. It might be a CTR of 25.0 but actually it was pretty rubbish performing pseudonym! So bottom line, what's the current thinking? Is there much point in creating lots of pseudonyms anymore? How many do people have and are people still using them to let different images live or die on their own merits? Thanks Ian.