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I think your timescale is right - I joined about 15 million ago and the ascent to 50 million has been really rapid. I wonder what such a large collection really means for the future of Alamy and the contributors?

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 I wonder what such a large library really means for the future of Alamy and the contributors?

 

For Alamy i would think a bright future with having the largest amount of images under 1 roof,  for the contributors it will be harder to be seen,  bit like a needle in a haystack,  it would be interesting to know just how many images a photo editor looks at, being so many on Alamy,  if the average editor only views the 1st 10 pages it would mean  millions of images will never be seen.

 

Nice to have 50 million, if only 1 million is regularly viewed it would seem the rest is just there to make Alamy look big in the business.

 

Paul.

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 I wonder what such a large collection really means for the future of Alamy and the contributors?

 

Poor returns for the latter......

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I think also a key question is , what is the % share of the total pool that a photographer with a diverse collection should aim for

 

Obviously given the rate of growth on alamy, each of our percentage shares is dropping.

 

You'd need 50,000 live images for just a 0.1% share

 

I'd like to stay above 0.01%

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I have been keeping a record of my total versus Alamy total since 23/04/2012 when Alamy total reached 30million.  

 

I then had 5113 images and my share was 166.82ppm (parts per million)

 

A year later, in May 2013, my share peaked at 173.3ppm.

 

Latest upload on 21/08/2014, I had 8070 images and my share is 161.69ppm.

 

To have kept pace with Alamy growth I would need 8341 images, so I feel I have done a reasonable job of "keeping up".

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I would guess that the larger the Alamy portfolio the more likely the client is to visit first for diverse searches. It is hard to see how the smaller agencies will survive unless the have a distinctive USP i.e. niche player in a specialised sector.

 

dov

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I often read on the topic,  (how was your month, e.g. May, June, July),  so many forum people stating they make regular sales, apart from a few most have less than 20,000 images, and selling almost every month,  it would seem that there are a group that have a much higher percentage than 0.1% in sales, with Alamy's 50 million, it is not a bad result for some.

 

Paul.

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I remain convinced that the larger the collection grows, the more customers will use the New button to separate out the more recent pics. So by continually uploading new material I am giving myself the best chance. I just wish I could devote more of my time to taking photographs.

 

Alan

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I remain convinced that the larger the collection grows, the more customers will use the New button to separate out the more recent pics. So by continually uploading new material I am giving myself the best chance. I just wish I could devote more of my time to taking photographs.

 

Alan

 

I agree with that, I had a sale recently of a red Royal Mail post box (!).    After the sale I did a search which showed (from memory) about 16,000 images, so why mine?    Answer is in "New" it was near the top..

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I remain convinced that the larger the collection grows, the more customers will use the New button to separate out the more recent pics. So by continually uploading new material I am giving myself the best chance. I just wish I could devote more of my time to taking photographs.

 

I've been wondering how contribs have been viewing the "new" button since those heady days when many on this forum raised strong objections to the new button.

 

I tend to agree with you and my evidence shows increasing zooms and sales for images uploaded in the past 12 months or so - and yes I have increased my uploads to benefit from my evidence that shows the new button is probably the most popular way that buyers search- I'm sure alamy has the portfolio evidence of buyers preferred searching button

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Only that I would think creative buyers, i.e. ad-agency people, art-buyers, designers, etc would find it a daunting and time consuming task to try and find anything. The more files the more assets, so its looking pretty good for Alamy.

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Being new to Alamy (under a week) I claim no expertise whatsoever in how it operates!  However, looking purely at the numbers and what appears obvious (but I may be misinterpreting):

 

Interesting if you start to play with the stats here... if a lot of contributors try to get up to the 0.01% i.e. 50,000 images, then of course the total goes above 50M... and then you have to contribute 51,000... then 52,000 and so on.  So you're really on a losing wicket if you try to play the pure numbers game (I love combining those metaphors).

 

What might be more effective is to have some good analysis tools to determine what you should be contributing.  Of course they could only be used by a small number of contributors or you end up back in the same situation as above, with everybody jumping on the bandwagon.

 

Probably more interesting would be to have Alamy do something a bit more intelligent for different buyers... a more "intelligent" search.  I don't know enough about the various media buyers but I would think that there would be types of image that would suit some and not others (e.g. newspapers versus book publishers), that some will be looking for uniqueness and others won't care.  With 50M images, is keywording really enough?  Perhaps everyone should write a full description of each image and that description, along with some technical analysis should form the basis of future searches? There's clearly a balance between what is there already and the difficulty of migrating a 50M collection to a new indexing/search method.  I really don't envy the guys at Alamy with the problem of trying to resolve this one!

 

Does anyone know what their annual turnover (financial) is?

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Being new to Alamy (under a week) I claim no expertise whatsoever in how it operates!  However, looking purely at the numbers and what appears obvious (but I may be misinterpreting):

 

Interesting if you start to play with the stats here... if a lot of contributors try to get up to the 0.01% i.e. 50,000 images, then of course the total goes above 50M... and then you have to contribute 51,000... then 52,000 and so on.  So you're really on a losing wicket if you try to play the pure numbers game (I love combining those metaphors).

 

What might be more effective is to have some good analysis tools to determine what you should be contributing.  Of course they could only be used by a small number of contributors or you end up back in the same situation as above, with everybody jumping on the bandwagon.

 

Probably more interesting would be to have Alamy do something a bit more intelligent for different buyers... a more "intelligent" search.  I don't know enough about the various media buyers but I would think that there would be types of image that would suit some and not others (e.g. newspapers versus book publishers), that some will be looking for uniqueness and others won't care.  With 50M images, is keywording really enough?  Perhaps everyone should write a full description of each image and that description, along with some technical analysis should form the basis of future searches? There's clearly a balance between what is there already and the difficulty of migrating a 50M collection to a new indexing/search method.  I really don't envy the guys at Alamy with the problem of trying to resolve this one!

 

Does anyone know what their annual turnover (financial) is?

 

The "description" fields used to be searchable, but this apparently resulted in too many irrelevant search results. Consequently, Alamy decided to change the description field to unsearchable some time ago. Some contributors were probably putting all kinds of odd stuff in there, such as long excerpts from Wikipedia articles, etc.

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Being new to Alamy (under a week) I claim no expertise whatsoever in how it operates!  However, looking purely at the numbers and what appears obvious (but I may be misinterpreting):

 

Interesting if you start to play with the stats here... if a lot of contributors try to get up to the 0.01% i.e. 50,000 images, then of course the total goes above 50M... and then you have to contribute 51,000... then 52,000 and so on.  So you're really on a losing wicket if you try to play the pure numbers game (I love combining those metaphors).

 

What might be more effective is to have some good analysis tools to determine what you should be contributing.  Of course they could only be used by a small number of contributors or you end up back in the same situation as above, with everybody jumping on the bandwagon.

 

Probably more interesting would be to have Alamy do something a bit more intelligent for different buyers... a more "intelligent" search.  I don't know enough about the various media buyers but I would think that there would be types of image that would suit some and not others (e.g. newspapers versus book publishers), that some will be looking for uniqueness and others won't care.  With 50M images, is keywording really enough?  Perhaps everyone should write a full description of each image and that description, along with some technical analysis should form the basis of future searches? There's clearly a balance between what is there already and the difficulty of migrating a 50M collection to a new indexing/search method.  I really don't envy the guys at Alamy with the problem of trying to resolve this one!

 

Does anyone know what their annual turnover (financial) is?

Fortunately 0.01% is just 5000 images

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I'm not worried about the total number. I'm just keeping my own stats healthy. Cleaning up stupid keywording from when I first started and hoping that when it's time to play the flute, I hit all the notes. There really is a wealth of content out there. 50m images out of everything that's in the world is nothing. I bet it took more than 50m images to put Google Earth and street view together and look how useful that is. 

 

You might not be able to compete with those numbers but I shouldn't out you off. Localise it and you'll see that you have just as much a chance to succeed at this than anyone. It's just about plucking out the gold from the stone. 

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I'm not worried about the total number. I'm just keeping my own stats healthy. Cleaning up stupid keywording from when I first started and hoping that when it's time to play the flute, I hit all the notes. There really is a wealth of content out there. 50m images out of everything that's in the world is nothing. I bet it took more than 50m images to put Google Earth and street view together and look how useful that is. 

 

You might not be able to compete with those numbers but I shouldn't out you off. Localise it and you'll see that you have just as much a chance to succeed at this than anyone. It's just about plucking out the gold from the stone.

 

+1

 

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I remain convinced that the larger the collection grows, the more customers will use the New button to separate out the more recent pics. So by continually uploading new material I am giving myself the best chance. I just wish I could devote more of my time to taking photographs.

 

Alan

Not statistically significant I confess, but in tune with my perception of what is selling to the Newspaper scheme, here are the data from what I identified today in the Mail Online

 

19 images

 

6 beginning with Alamy code A

5 B

4 C

0 D

4 E

 

So there appears to be life in the old dogs yet!

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