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15 hours ago, Joseph Clemson said:

 

There are definitely some of my exclusive collection showing up on Alamy, but by no means all. I now notice that Pond5 is credited as the contributor on all these new videos with no mention of the original creator (my claim to fame will have to wait a little longer). The jury is out on whether we will be able to contribute video directly through Alamy, but my betting is Not.

I've found several of my videos from Pond5 in Alamy's collection, and also noticed that Pond5 is credited as the contributor, but the photographer and location is identified in the detailed information.

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This is no doubt a dumb question, but I wonder if P5 video clip "zooms" will show up in Alamy Measures -- i.e. if a potential buyer clicks on a clip and views it, will this will register as a zoom in "Your images""?  Not that I'm expecting any with my tiny clip collection.

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1 hour ago, John Mitchell said:

This is no doubt a dumb question, but I wonder if P5 video clip "zooms" will show up in Alamy Measures -- i.e. if a potential buyer clicks on a clip and views it, will this will register as a zoom in "Your images""?  Not that I'm expecting any with my tiny clip collection.

 

I don't see why it shouldn't register as a zoom, supposing video clicks work the way of still image clicks. However, it would register as a zoom on the account of Pond5 who are the ones with the contributor account. The original creator (me, thee and others) would not see any sniff of a benefit from said click. This is just one of the reasons it would be nice to have the facility to directly upload our own clips to Alamy. 

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5 minutes ago, Joseph Clemson said:

 

I don't see why it shouldn't register as a zoom, supposing video clicks work the way of still image clicks. However, it would register as a zoom on the account of Pond5 who are the ones with the contributor account. The original creator (me, thee and others) would not see any sniff of a benefit from said click. This is just one of the reasons it would be nice to have the facility to directly upload our own clips to Alamy. 

 

Thanks. That makes sense.

 

Yes, it would be nice, but my guess is that Alamy is happy with this type of distribution arrangement (or whatever it is) -- less hassle, less work for them.

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13 minutes ago, Sally R said:

Looking at the clips being marketed from Alamy's homepage, I clicked on a few and the contributor is Pond5 and further down the photographer (videographer) is Black Box Guild. I clicked on the hyperlink for Black Box Guild and there are 1,680,226 images from them on Alamy. I followed up on who Back Box Guild are https://www.blackbox.global and also read this review of them https://www.spartaq.com/en/what-is-blackbox-an-honest-review/

 

At the time of the review article Black Box Guild were acting as distributors to Pond5, Shutterstock, Adobe Stock and Vimeo. Now it appears Alamy are a major distribution channel as well but via Pond5. So there seem to be multiple layers of distribution happening. So a videographer submitting to Black Box Guild has their work then distributed to Pond5 and then further distributed to Alamy.

 

I just thought that info might be of interest to those doing video or looking to do so in the future in terms of how the market seems to be working. It seems that multiple agencies are increasingly enmeshed in various ways.

 

I think you are right about an increasingly complex web of agencies and distributors with both still and video content appearing around the world on sites you never originally uploaded to, and possibly don't want to - hence quite a lot of contributors opt out of these partnership deals. 

 

Black Box guild are a combination of another agency of a kind ('community of creators') and upload aggregator. Simply put, you upload your content to them and they take the strain of administration: captioning, keywording etc and then the uploading to the four main microstock agencies. You then wait for the income to come rolling in 🙂 (less the Black Box cut).

 

I decided to keep the proverbial ten-foot barge pole between me and Black Box. Contributors who upload through them lose much of the control that a contributor has when they upload as an individual. Doing it oneself makes the work of being a contributor harder, but the results and rewards are mine

 

Black Box is, in essence, a lazy way of being a stock video contributor. But what if, just to give one example of loss of control, one of the agencies (perish the thought) changes their contibutor contract and you are unhappy about it. As far as I can see you have no opt out for any specific agency. It's all or nothing (unless I'm missing something). I'd be surprised if the typically grizzled and savvy Alamy contributor looking to move into video picked the Black Box route.

 

I am happy uploading to Pond5. I am probably happy with them distributing through Alamy (and other partnerships), though I would like to know more about the precise terms of the distribution. I have uploaded in the past to other video microstock  agencies, currently with less happiness, and I'm taking steps to reduce my presence on them. Black Box? A big NO from me.

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26 minutes ago, BobD said:

Can't find any of my clips on here, even repeat sellers are not here.

 

The initial import of Pond5 material to Alamy remains unchanged as of Saturday morning, as far as I can tell. I've been looking at which bits of my portfolios have transferred and which haven't, but so far haven't seen any identifiable pattern. I've raised a query with Pond5 support on how this is all working. I should get a reply in the next few days which may, or may not, be enlightening.

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5 minutes ago, Sally R said:

 

.... I like that Pond5 allows contributors to set their own prices, but I imagine this option is lost if it comes via Black Box.

 

Yes, it looks like Alamy have set their own price points for all their Pond5 clips (not just those from Black Box) - £48 for a standard HD licence. This equates to around $66 at present. I personally use a range of prices for HD content on Pond5, mostly  from $50 to $75, so Alamy are about the mid-point of that range. 

 

Of course Alamy will take their cut from the £48 and that also assumes they will not discount that price point when actually making the sale - possibly a rash assumption. However, Pond5 also give themselves the power to vary the price point set by the contributor, both in the displayed sale price and in the actual amount charged to the customer at the time of sale. This happens quite frequently meaning Pond5 sales at the price I set are actually the exception. Even so, they are far, far, from being the worst agency in this respect.

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7 hours ago, BobD said:

Can't find any of my clips on here, even repeat sellers are not here.

 

Mine (all of which appear to have been transferred) are mostly repeat non-sellers if that means anything. Perhaps P5 wants to keep the better performing clips for themselves.

 

 

Edited by John Mitchell
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7 hours ago, Joseph Clemson said:

 

I think you are right about an increasingly complex web of agencies and distributors with both still and video content appearing around the world on sites you never originally uploaded to, and possibly don't want to - hence quite a lot of contributors opt out of these partnership deals. 

 

 

The overlap among agencies, distributors, sub-distributors, etc. is now mind-boggling. I can't begin to understand how they all keep track of what has been sent where by whom and for what reason. It's almost as if we're moving towards some kind of Orwellian ONE BIG STOCK AGENCY in which the little guys (i.e. us) who supply the images, clips, etc. barely exist.

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2 hours ago, John Mitchell said:

 

Mine (all of which appear to have been transferred) are mostly repeat non-sellers if that means anything. Perhaps P5 wants to keep the better performing clips for themselves.

 

 

 

You might be barking up the right tree. While one or two of my sellers over the past two years have transferredto Alamy, the majority have not.  In some cases other shots from the same shoot have transferred but not ones which sold. I think there is more to it than just non-sellers, but that seems to be part of it.

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11 minutes ago, Joseph Clemson said:

 

You might be barking up the right tree. While one or two of my sellers over the past two years have transferredto Alamy, the majority have not.  In some cases other shots from the same shoot have transferred but not ones which sold. I think there is more to it than just non-sellers, but that seems to be part of it.

 

Yes, I believe that a certain other big micro did something similar with its non-selling clips, but we'll probably never know the whole story.

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If Alamy are distributing the poorer non selling  clips from Pond5 then they have lost a great opportunity to create a UK based video library that is an edited collection of the best  footage available. 

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From Alamy's perspective, I guess it's an extra revenue stream. They don't have to provide the storage for the videos and they don't have to employee a whole load new QC people for reviewing videos.

 

From Pond5's perspective, it's another distribution channel for potential for sales. I wonder how this works though in terms of the Pond5 contributors getting their share... given as Pond5 contributors can set their own price but the pricing on Alamy seems fairly fixed.

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1 hour ago, Matt Ashmore said:

From Alamy's perspective, I guess it's an extra revenue stream. They don't have to provide the storage for the videos and they don't have to employee a whole load new QC people for reviewing videos.

 

From Pond5's perspective, it's another distribution channel for potential for sales. I wonder how this works though in terms of the Pond5 contributors getting their share... given as Pond5 contributors can set their own price but the pricing on Alamy seems fairly fixed.

 

Yes, it makes sense for Alamy. Also, the video-clip market now seems to be starting to experience the same problems as stock photography -- oversupply, subject saturation, low-priced subscriptions, etc. -- that will inevitably drive prices down, so this probably is not an opportune time for Alamy to enter the race on its own.

 

My guess is that anyone who licenses a P5 video thru Alamy will end up with about 25%-30% of what it sells for here, but who knows.

 

 

Edited by John Mitchell
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Someone may have pointed this out earlier in the thread however I don't see it.  Click on a video supplied to Alamy by Pond 5 and this number is revealed:

 

Pond5 (5,979,718)

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39 minutes ago, Tsado said:

Someone may have pointed this out earlier in the thread however I don't see it.  Click on a video supplied to Alamy by Pond 5 and this number is revealed:

 

Pond5 (5,979,718)

 

Thank you for spotting that little gem of information. Given that Pond5 claims to have over 22 milion videos in its collection, it looks like a little over a quarter of them are available through Alamy. Some Pond5 contributors will have opted out of the Global Partnership Program so that explains why some at least have not transferred over to Alamy. Not sure about the rest yet.

 

Your insight also prompted my to click on the photographer name and, lo and behold, it brings up the rest of the photographer's portfolio. I can now see that just over half of my non-exclusive portfolio has transferred across and around 25% of my exclusive portfolio (which tend to be newer clips). At least I can now see more easily what is here and what is not.

 

 If Alamy are reading this, they might also like to invstigate a problem with the import of these Pond5 clips. Where keywords are multi-word phrases, the import routine has stripped out the spaces and concatenated the phrase into a single string. So, 'raised flower bed' has become raisedflowerbed. The Alamy search does not recognise the concatenated string as separate words and the relevant clips are not found. This is a significant problem for me as I use keyword phrases a lot. 

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I had noticed the impressive total number (OMG) but not that my pseudo was clickable. It seems my entire tiny collection has arrived, save one lonely clip that got left behind for some reason. I'm currently uploading some new clips, which I haven't done for a long time, so it will interesting to see if/when they get transferred.

 

I had to Google "concatenated" -- new word for me.

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2 hours ago, Joseph Clemson said:

If Alamy are reading this, they might also like to invstigate a problem with the import of these Pond5 clips. Where keywords are multi-word phrases, the import routine has stripped out the spaces and concatenated the phrase into a single string. So, 'raised flower bed' has become raisedflowerbed. The Alamy search does not recognise the concatenated string as separate words and the relevant clips are not found. This is a significant problem for me as I use keyword phrases a lot.

Worth reporting that diectly to contributors@alamy.com in case they miss the forum posting.

 

Mark

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18 minutes ago, M.Chapman said:

Worth reporting that diectly to contributors@alamy.com in case they miss the forum posting.

 

Mark

 

Will do, though  I am sure they are hanging on to every word of wisdom we contributors post here and take extra care to ensure it shapes their way of thinking, indeed their whole philosophy of life.🙂

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I still can't see any of my clips here, I thought at first it may be because I do animations but there are plenty of animations here.

I belong to the global partner programme and other 'opportunities' programmes so cannot work out what the criteria is.

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7 hours ago, John Mitchell said:

Somehow I don't think that anyone is going to sift through almost six million video clips looking for "concatenated" keywords, but I guess you never know. 😎

 

I'm assuming the IT department will resolve the import issue which mistreats keyword phrases and re-import the 6 million video clips correctly.

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4 minutes ago, BobD said:

I still can't see any of my clips here, I thought at first it may be because I do animations but there are plenty of animations here.

I belong to the global partner programme and other 'opportunities' programmes so cannot work out what the criteria is.

 

I've had a response from Pond5 support which indicates that the clips imported by Alamy are governed by selection criteria set by Alamy themselves. Part of the selection criteria being those clips with a Pond5 price point similar to Alamy's pricing. If Alamy have deliberately or inadvertently excluded animations, or if the Pond5 price is unusually high (or low?) then you might have slipped through the net. I can now see that none of my animations have made the transition either.

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It would be really helpful if Alamy would be upfront about the criteria for selection of clips from the Pond5 library. Also, whether the portfolio of selected clips is going to be updated on a regular basis so that new contributors to Pond5 can expect to see their work appear through Alamy. Alamy contributors could then make an informed choice about whether to venture into the field of video via the Pond5 route.

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