How was your 2020 ?

[Jansos]

Seem to have slipped a bit since 2019 but I am no longer doing Live News (a lot of work and little $ reward, not to mention getting on the approved list)

2020 - 301 sales for $6680 gross

2019 - 337 sales for $8036 gross

2018 - 318 sales for $7897 gross

CTR .5 on average

ATB, John

[Alex Ramsay]

1 hour ago, Reimar said:

Alex, I also had to upload to pbase.  When you click the "insert image from URL" link, copy the URL but add ".jpg"

That should work.

Is your graph similar to mine?

Sadly no - I just get a 'direct link denied' message

Edited January 2, 2021 by Alex Ramsay

[TABan]

Best year volume-wise but revenue is about where it always has been for the last several years, with the exception of 2018 when I had a $$$$ sale. It reminds me of what the Red Queen said to Alice.

 

I’m probably going to switch from shooting with stock in mind to concentrating on my commercial work as well as fine art. I was going through images yesterday and realized I have a huge backlog of stock appropriate images to upload, so getting those up will be the majority of what I do stock-wise.

[MizBrown]

Five sales in 2020 for a total gross $231.69/average $46.34.  I cringe when people suggest that I take travel photos since those and some plants have been the low balls in the group.  The fish photos seem to be the ones with the higher pay rate, along with the deaf Nicaraguan kid.  I think for anyone who can set up a specialty that most photographers aren't going for is probably better than taking the scenic photos that every tourist photographer gets (recently, I looked at all the Leon, Nicaragua, photos, 40 pages of them).   If someone is looking for a photo of the main cathedral in Leon, they have an enormous number of choices, pre and post reconstruction.   There's not one of the cathedral wrapped in protective construction cloth (I have two but haven't uploaded them yet).   If thousands of something exist, the prices will be low.  Culture Trip goes for those photos.  If the buyer has seven photos only and they're not too similar, and everyone else is offering completely irrelevant "Nicaraguan Spanish on signs," then I've got the sale.  If they want Mexican/short finned Mollies, they have some choices, but some of them are not wild type mollies.   I know the collecting location for the parents of mine. 

 

Edited January 2, 2021 by MizBrown

[Reimar]

34 minutes ago, Alex Ramsay said:

Sadly no - I just get a 'direct link denied' message

Hmm.  I copy the URL for the image file on pbase (https://pbase.com/image/171313671)

and then add .jpg to get https://pbase.com/image/171313671.jpg

Are you putting that in to the insert image from URL line?

[Ed Rooney]

On 01/01/2021 at 13:15, Sally R said:

At the end of my first full year at Alamy (joined 29 September 2019).

For 2020 I have 6 sales for $142 gross.

 

Stay with it, Sally — you got the touch. This is a long game and very frustrating at the beginning. 

[Allan Bell]

39 minutes ago, Ed Rooney said:

 

Stay with it, Sally — you got the touch. This is a long game and very frustrating at the beginning. 

 

Flippin' frustrating at other times too.

 

Allan

 

[Bionic]

5 licences for $369 (all in the first half of the year though) which given the size of my port I can live with. The second half has seen both views and zooms drop significantly although at least my CTR is holding up

[sb photos]

Before the Covid Pandemic I was expecting this to be a very good year, but it held up until December. Then no sales, but zooms held up.

 

2020 number of sales 9% down and revenue up by 21% on 2019. Not good but could have been worse. Will be more proactive this year.

[KellyC]

Still no sales at all but at least I got some zooms this year. Got more uploaded and worked on keywords quite a bit. 

[John Walker]

Just one image short of my 2019 total.  Revenue on a par.

[Marianne]

A flurry of sales stating in November got my sales volume up from last year, but revenue was sadly way down (2nd worst revenue after my first year, 2008, when I had a very tiny port). Of most concern, average price took a serious nosedive - $26. Despite a few exclusives, there were also some distributor sales, so I earned an average of $11 per sale. In most bars & restaurants in my neighborhood (not that I've been to one in a vey very long while), that won't even buy you a single cocktail. Discouraging. Net income from Alamy dropped by about 100% - that's right, I earned less than half of what I did last year. And I added new images. 

 

Hoping once the coronavirus is under control, the new owners will have a chance to implement marketing changes and grow the business, but aside from one of my sites where I saw sales grow, stock seems to be on a decline, though despite those declines I still earned more from each of my handful of ms sites than from Alamy, including one I quit in June and another where I have 100 images that I haven't done anything with in years. Alamy still gets my better images but this year was really discouraging and I wonder why they do. 

 

2020 was a weird year, so I wont judge it too harshly. Here's to a much better 2021!

[Cryptoprocta]

10 hours ago, MizBrown said:

   If thousands of something exist, the prices will be low. 

That's not how pricing on Alamy works. I've had an 'alamywhack' (a subject for which, at the time of sale, I had the only image on Alamy) sell for tiddlers.

The prices are what the buyer negotiates, presumably based on the amount they guarantee to buy. We have no negotiating power.

If you doubt that, just check the Alamy 'rack rate' prices for common subjects and under-represented subects, and you'll find they're the same prices.

If thousands of something exist, we have a lot more competition, for sure, so our image either has to be better or different enough to catch the buyer's eye. Or maybe if there are pages of a subject and our file is badly placed, the buyer will never see our image, if they only look at the first page or two. Them's the breaks. 😒

 

Edited January 3, 2021 by Cryptoprocta

[John Mitchell]

1 hour ago, Cryptoprocta said:

That's not how pricing on Alamy works. I've had an 'alamywhack' (a subject for which, at the time of sale, I had the only image on Alamy) sell for tiddlers.

The prices are what the buyer negotiates, presumably based on the amount they guarantee to buy. We have no negotiating power.

If you doubt that, just check the Alamy 'rack rate' prices for common subjects and under-represented subects, and you'll find they're the same prices.

If thousands of something exist, we have a lot more competition, for sure, so our image either has to be better or different enough to catch the buyer's eye. Or maybe if there are pages of a subject and our file is badly placed, the buyer will never see our image, if they only look at the first page or two. Them's the breaks. 😒

 

 

Exactly. There are a lot of factors involved. Much depends on the type of buyer and negotiated price. I've had "alamywhacks" license at a full spectrum of prices, from a few dollars to $$$. Ranking is also very important. Even images of saturated subjects can license for decent amounts due to good ranking.

[MizBrown]

8 minutes ago, John Mitchell said:

 

Exactly. There are a lot of factors involved. Much depends on the type of buyer and negotiated price. I've had "alamywhacks" license at a full spectrum of prices, from a few dollars to $$$. Ranking is also very important. Even images of saturated subjects can license for decent amounts due to good ranking.

 

My high price ever was a pair of cichlids for  $192.84.    One of the arms collection I photographed licensed for over $80, the deaf kid signing in Nicaraguan Sign Language licensed for around $140.   My sample size may be far too small to draw generalizations, but I prefer photographing fish and arms collections, and interiors where people are working, where I have an interest in what people are doing.

 

It's possible that the people who looked several times over the several years for Nicaraguan Sign Language photos were not typical Alamy customers, though they'd bought before to have had the zooms registered.

 

B. I'm sure that I don't have a high rank.  I doubt I'd get there by taking more pictures of things that are saturated in the Alamy collection.

 

I wish I'd taken better pictures of some things.   Or taken some of them with better cameras (photos of Twin Oaks and Acorn communities in Virginia, the mouth of a cannon at Manassas, Eureka Springs in Arkansas.   I took more pictures of Boaco than of Leon, and I didn't take any pictures of Granada, which I don't get.   Boaco has almost no tourists even though it's visually fascinating.  They're not desperate enough.   No beggars, either.  

 

Whatever. 

 

 

 

 

[John Mitchell]

15 hours ago, MizBrown said:

 

My high price ever was a pair of cichlids for  $192.84.    One of the arms collection I photographed licensed for over $80, the deaf kid signing in Nicaraguan Sign Language licensed for around $140.   My sample size may be far too small to draw generalizations, but I prefer photographing fish and arms collections, and interiors where people are working, where I have an interest in what people are doing.

 

It's possible that the people who looked several times over the several years for Nicaraguan Sign Language photos were not typical Alamy customers, though they'd bought before to have had the zooms registered.

 

B. I'm sure that I don't have a high rank.  I doubt I'd get there by taking more pictures of things that are saturated in the Alamy collection.

 

I wish I'd taken better pictures of some things.   Or taken some of them with better cameras (photos of Twin Oaks and Acorn communities in Virginia, the mouth of a cannon at Manassas, Eureka Springs in Arkansas.   I took more pictures of Boaco than of Leon, and I didn't take any pictures of Granada, which I don't get.   Boaco has almost no tourists even though it's visually fascinating.  They're not desperate enough.   No beggars, either.  

 

Whatever. 

 

 

 

 

 

It sounds to me like your on the right track, Rebecca. Photographing what you know and enjoy is the most productive way to go IMO. I was just pointing out that pricing can be complicated. The same image that licenses for $$$ one day to a book publisher can easily sell for peanuts to a travel website (like CT) on the next day. That said, looking at my sales during 2020, uniqueness seems to be becoming ever more important. Good luck in 2021.

[zxzoomy]

35 sales for $576 gross. Double my 2019 sales! But it gets me walking about and talking to people. 

[Olli]

On 02/01/2021 at 17:04, MizBrown said:

Five sales in 2020 for a total gross $231.69/average $46.34.  I cringe when people suggest that I take travel photos since those and some plants have been the low balls in the group.  The fish photos seem to be the ones with the higher pay rate, along with the deaf Nicaraguan kid.  I think for anyone who can set up a specialty that most photographers aren't going for is probably better than taking the scenic photos that every tourist photographer gets (recently, I looked at all the Leon, Nicaragua, photos, 40 pages of them).  .... 

 

Well, you seem to be one of the few people with simliar amount of pics on sale. I have only very recently started going through most in order to 'optimize' them, as I almost exclusively uplaoded to Live News in the past, and hence none were optimized. Lets see if it makes much difference:

TBH, I see most my sales from the China pics I shoot mainly. They fit into categories often used by editorial clients, and hence often get used over (smog, housing bubble, construction...). I think this might actually be key to getting more regular sales, shoot subjects that are repeately in the news, have a money shot of each of them.

Stats:

Summary for 01 January 2020 to 03 January 2021 ( 5 item(s) totalling $177.87 )
Average CTR for O. Geibel: 0.8 

I think its down somewhat from the prvious year,

Edited January 3, 2021 by Olli

[MizBrown]

1 hour ago, John Mitchell said:

 

It sounds to me like your on the right track, Rebecca. Photographing what you know and enjoy is the most productive way to go IMO. I was just pointing out that pricing can be complicated. The same image that licenses for $$$ one day to a book publisher can easily sell for peanuts to a travel website (like CT) on the next day. That said, looking at my sales during 2020, uniqueness seems to be becoming ever more important. Good luck in 2021.

 

Obviously, Alamy has its $100,000 earners, but if that's gross over several years, it's still supplemental income.   I get pleasure out of figuring out how to do things better.   I suspect CultureTrip licensed one of my plant photos, but I can't really imagine how they used it.  And I think for them, the pool of available photos is huge between professionals, and serious amateurs who take photographic vacations.  

[MizBrown]

7 minutes ago, Olli said:

I have only very recently started going through most in order to 'optimize' them, as I almost exclusively uplaoded to Live News in the past, and hence none were optimized. Lets see if it makes much difference:

 

Um, not a good idea necessarily.   Optimization can lead to lots of desperate keywords. 

 

Nicaragua is in the international news for four things: sports, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and people having a go at each other in larger numbers. 

 

[Olli]

39 minutes ago, MizBrown said:

 

Um, not a good idea necessarily.   Optimization can lead to lots of desperate keywords. 

 

Yes, I imagine that might be a danger... Worked at AFP Regional HQ picture desk in the past, and you might be surpised that they dont use keywords directly. Its all extracted from the description (which must include the 5 'W's'). What I find most frustrating is not the issue of adding 50 relevant keywords, but having such a clunky interface... I mean, come on Alamy... at least let us see the friggin keywords in alphabetical order, if we cant have a simple text list!

Edited January 3, 2021 by Olli

[meanderingemu]

19 minutes ago, Olli said:

Yes, I imagine that might be a danger... Worked at AFP Regional HQ picture desk in thepast, and you might be surpised that they dont use keywords directly. Its all extracted from the description (which must include the 5 'W's'). What I find most frustrating is not having to come up with 50 relevant keywords, but having such a clunky interface... I mean, come on. At least let us see the friggin keywords in alphabetical order, if we cant have a simple text list!

 

optimizing your caption and KW is actually a good idea, however this is not done with the colour codes from Alamy.  It's done by having a descriptive caption that includes what is in the image, which means sometimes having to remove some of the filler information from Live News captions- i often have situational stuff that i don't want to be searchable only in "extra info" 

it means maximising KW and supertags, 

It means making some validation once in a while if you are getting too many false positive figuring do you really need the marginal KW in first place.  

 

 

of course this assumes Alamy still reranks us based on CTR....

[Dave Nelson]

2020 - 16 sales for $581 gross

2019 - 8 sales for $339

Definitely moving in the right direction.

 

Hoping to upload many more images in 2021.

[Broad Norfolk]

Following on from my best year ever in 2019 it's a bit like after the Lord Mayor's show this time:-

Sales down 6%

Views down 7%

Zooms down 7%

CTR up 6%

And horror above horrors, Revenue was down 47%

Grit your teeth and carry on!

Jim 😏

 

[Wahavi]

My second full year here. In 2019 I had only 3 sales, in 2020 it was 21. Revenue was doubled.

Thanks all of you for the plenty of advice, and Alamy for connecting to buyers!