Commission change - any changes in response by you?

[geogphotos]

Thanks Betty, that's kind of you.

[John Morrison]

5 hours ago, Betty LaRue said:

I, too, am happy to see you back, Ian. You left a hole in the forum.

Betty

 

Ah, so it was Ian! I’d been wondering who left that damned hole there…

[BobD]

 I was, and had intended to stay exclusive to Alamy. However since the commission change I have been gradually working to become non exclusive. 

I am only uploading to one other (MS) agency but am having 5-8 sales a day with a far smaller port than on Alamy, albeit at smaller prices. 

I made this decision as the change was a wake up call for me as to the direction I believe Alamy is taking. Lets not forget this is not the first commission change , but the second since I have been a contributor.

On top of that, although my sales were holding up, the sale prices were falling through the floor. It seemed to me at the time that Alamy was using the extra profit to cut prices even further.

I intend to slowly move further away from exclusivity to maximise income from my images.

Having said that, the last couple of months I have found sales increasing slightly here and prices improving to the degree that I will start uploading again.

[geogphotos]

1 hour ago, John Morrison said:

 

Ah, so it was Ian! I’d been wondering who left that damned hole there…

 

Okay thank you. That's enough guys!

[geogphotos]

48 minutes ago, BobD said:

 I was, and had intended to stay exclusive to Alamy. However since the commission change I have been gradually working to become non exclusive. 

I am only uploading to one other (MS) agency but am having 5-8 sales a day with a far smaller port than on Alamy, albeit at smaller prices. 

I made this decision as the change was a wake up call for me as to the direction I believe Alamy is taking. Lets not forget this is not the first commission change , but the second since I have been a contributor.

On top of that, although my sales were holding up, the sale prices were falling through the floor. It seemed to me at the time that Alamy was using the extra profit to cut prices even further.

I intend to slowly move further away from exclusivity to maximise income from my images.

Having said that, the last couple of months I have found sales increasing slightly here and prices improving to the degree that I will start uploading again.

 

Thanks Bob, that is a very good point. I have perhaps seen the same, as mentioned above with a major UK broadsheet newspaper that used to pay comparatively well.

 

Having said that mean Alamy sales totals are much better than my other major agency where on several occasions I have had commission of $00.01 ( to be fair I do submit through a third party so only get 65% of what they get) but most sales are less than $5 to me, many just in the cents. But the other side of that is sales are two to three times larger in terms of volume because this agency has a truly global reach well beyond that of Alamy and there are often one or two very good fees which compensates.  Usually the earnings from this are much the same as from Alamy. And the two together is about what I would have expected to get from Alamy alone in the past with far fewer images.

 

One complication is this ridiculously outdated RF/RM division which is largely meaningless these days in terms of licence details.

 

 

Edited July 29, 2019 by geogphotos

[Matt Ashmore]

30 minutes ago, geogphotos said:

One complication is this ridiculously outdated RF/RM division which is largely meaningless these days in terms of licence details.

 

i guess you could ask Alamy to change all of your images to be RF in one go if this is the direction you wanted to go. But then there is the question as to which should then have the 'editorial Only' flag enable and which shouldn't.

 

I agree though.. from an alamy perspective, the license type doesn't appear to make much difference in terms of pricing and the terms of the license get twisted to whatever Alamy agree with the buyer. I guess RM still has the advantage of not ruling out commercial use for an image that would otherwise need to be used only for editorial purposes without the correct releases (which the buyer might be able to get, particularly if they represent someone in the image that needs to provide the release).

Edited July 29, 2019 by Matt Ashmore

[geogphotos]

Just now, Matt Ashmore said:

 

i guess you could ask Alamy to change all of your images to be RF in one go if this is the direction you wanted to go. But then there is the question as to which should then have the 'editorial Only' flag enable and which shouldn't.

 

I agree though.. from an alamy perspective, the license type doesn't appear to make much difference in terms of pricing and the terms of the license get twisted to whatever Alamy agree with the buyer.

 

 

But then that would land me in trouble with my other agency. 

 

Out of curiosity I did contact Alamy with the standard licence details of one of the micros ( software) because to me it seemed just the same as many RM licences from Alamy. But was told that any image as RM on Alamy could not be used for this because it is RF. I can't see any real difference since there is a limit on the number of uses. Actually, this is less restrictive than many Alamy RM licences. 

 

 * Up to 500,000 copies or views of the asset

 * Unlimited web views

 * Use the asset in email marketing, mobile advertising, social media, or a broadcast program

[ACC]

15 hours ago, Shergar said:

Just a quick post to say I'm pleased you are back posting Ian. I for one are always interested in you opinion.

 

Cheers and gone

 

Shergar

I’ll second that - good to see you Ian 😊

[geogphotos]

30 minutes ago, ACC said:

I’ll second that - good to see you Ian 😊

 

Thanks Angela. Do you live in Suffolk? 

[ACC]

19 minutes ago, geogphotos said:

 

Thanks Angela. Do you live in Suffolk? 

Yes, Kesgrave

[geogphotos]

3 hours ago, ACC said:

Yes, Kesgrave

 

I remember that now. I'm the other side of Woodbridge at Shottisham. 

[Betty LaRue]

12 hours ago, John Morrison said:

 

Ah, so it was Ian! I’d been wondering who left that damned hole there…

🤣😁

[Bill Allsopp]

On 28/07/2019 at 09:31, geogphotos said:

....had to go through a spreadsheet of 60,000 images

Jeez, and I thought my few thousand were a pain in the .....

[geogphotos]

18 minutes ago, Bill Allsopp said:

Jeez, and I thought my few thousand were a pain in the .....

 

Yes, it really was an ordeal. First I had to wait six months to remove images from a couple of small agencies, then wait for a list of my images to be produced by G. This list had some obvious gaps so I had to do quite a lot of detective work from Sub Select spreadsheets and my own records,  even so ending up with several hundred that I had to search individually by caption and subject to see if they were on G or not, quite laborious for popular subjects with lots of images.

 

Being inexperienced with spreadsheets I had to go through one at a time, cell by cell, and made quite a few false starts - for example deleting data by mistake after weeks of sporadic work. In the end I learnt the importance of Saving every five minutes and making Duplicates. Anyway, I got there in the end and the changes should be going live by tomorrow's update. I am very grateful to W in Image Management for helping me, at a later stage, to recover some of that lost work that I mentioned - I had lost all my own image refs by mistake, all 60,000 of them in the column!

 

I did ask Contributor Services if there was any chance of a refund on images which were actually exclusive but for which I missed out on the 50% but I expect you can guess their response to that! 

 

The only pluses are that I have been able to spot some images that were missing from Alamy and which I have now sent - you can see them clicking my image link. And also I found quite a lot of duplicates which need sorting out. 

 

There was an overall sense of satisfaction when the job was complete but standing back from that now I can't help but be annoyed that I have been put through all this for no reason that I really understand except that it was just easy for Alamy to take money from me. 

 

I am left feeling heartily unmotivated and de-incentivised. That is why I can't quite face uploading any new work to Alamy. As others have remarked this exclusivity change has put contributors off Alamy and lost a tonne of goodwill. Not that I suppose that they much care, or at least not the decision makers at the top. 

[Bill Allsopp]

50 minutes ago, geogphotos said:

 

..........

I am left feeling heartily unmotivated and de-incentivised. That is why I can't quite face uploading any new work to Alamy. As others have remarked this exclusivity change has put contributors off Alamy and lost a tonne of goodwill. Not that I suppose that they much care, or at least not the decision makers at the top. 

All of which I certainly understand. I might do the same as my return per image from Alamy is less than a third of what I get from the only other library I use. 

[geogphotos]

Back to 50% today and three sales $154, $42, $42 gross. 

 

I find some enthusiasm returning!