Horror story

[Rolf Adlercreutz]

As Halloween is coming up, I thought I'd share this story. It connects with the now looked subject of distributors. On that subject, I never had any complaints on the distributor getting 40%. What I didn't like was Alamy raising their cut with 50%, from 30 to 40,% leaving me with 30%. So I opted out of almost all of them. My choice.

 

Anyway, some years ago I had pictures with an agency in Chicago named MyLoupe run by a very nice gentleman named Brian. Never made any sales for me and I was not surprised when he folded his tent.

Then I was contacted by another party called UIG that said they would take up this fallen case and carry on. I said OK but apart from a couple of news-letters I didn't hear anything more. 

But searching the web with my unusual name, I found pictures with my byline slash Getty. Now I have been an assignment shooter for Getty, but when they bought Liasion, I was thrown out with everybody else and all my stock pictures were returned to me.

So the other day I emailed UIG and as asked for some sales reports. Got them, 5 quarterly reports from 2014-15. It seams they just dumped everything onto Getty as a distributor where I had 28 sales resulting in the fantastic amount of 144 USD to me.

 

After that, Alamy distribution doesn't look too bad at all.

 

Rolf

[Robert Brook]

Coincidently I had a sales report in from a small agency this morning that uses UIG to distribute some of its collection, with most sales coming from Getty.  14 sales via UIG for £123 ($188), so, maybe a touch of Swedish noire but no Gothic horror.  Of course, I lose an additional 50%, but it helps the agency keep afloat.  Nowadays editorial photography is akin to charity work.

 

And, to my mind, that is the issue: editorial stock photography for mags and newspapers has had its chips.  Doesn't matter whether you sell it through Getty, Corbis or here - and in that respect here is just as good as the other two, if not better.  Needless to say, the money is in other areas of editorial and the full range of commercial usage.  And that is where distribution, properly organised, rocks.

[John Mitchell]

Interesting to hear your story. I was with MyLoupe as well. I actually made some very good sales through them at the beginning. However, I seem to remember that when Myloupe folded, contributors had the option of either deleting their images or passing them along to UIG and Getty. I chose deletion. Sounds like I might have made the right decision for a change.

[Bill Brooks]

Buyers are international. The internet is international. Why have distributors if you are a large well established international stock library?

 

If a buyer can click around the world to different stock websites and see the same image on different distributer sites, how does a stock library convince the buyer that the main stock library has a unique collection of images? Distributors dilute the brand.

 

If a collection is all over the web at different prices, terms, and conditions why wouldn’t the buyer click between distributor sites until they find the cheapest deal? Distributors compete with the main collection.

 

Distributors sometimes go in and out of business. Not a good thing if you are trying to track image rights, payments, copyright, distributor sales area, or the location of your digital image files. The main stock library has to spend time and money to manage distributors.

 

In pre internet days of RM, agencies distributed printed translated catalogues to well established local distributors who paid the cost of their catalogues. Opting into a system of local distributors through your main agent, could increase the photographer’s income by 60%. In the age of the internet, those days are long gone.

 

In the age of the internet, if a stock library is getting an extra 15% from distributors they may get more by translating their site, enlarging their collection to appeal to local markets, and doing some local promotion in those smaller markets. Stock libraries can do local promotion with one freelancer in a back bedroom, on commission, resident in the foreign market, promoting the translated main site. To Alamy’s credit it is doing something like this in some markets.

 

However once the distributor genie is out of the bottle, it is hard to put back.

[Robert Brook]

 

Buyers are international. The internet is international. Why have distributors if you are a large well established international stock library?

 

If a buyer can click around the world to different stock websites and see the same image on different distributer sites, how does a stock library convince the buyer that the main stock library has a unique collection of images? Distributors dilute the brand.

 

If a collection is all over the web at different prices, terms, and conditions why wouldn’t the buyer click between distributor sites until they find the cheapest deal? Distributors compete with the main collection.

 

Distributors sometimes go in and out of business. Not a good thing if you are trying to track image rights, payments, copyright, distributor sales area, or the location of your digital image files. The main stock library has to spend time and money to manage distributors.

 

In pre internet days of RM, agencies distributed printed translated catalogues to well established local distributors who paid the cost of their catalogues. Opting into a system of local distributors through your main agent, could increase the photographer’s income by 60%. In the age of the internet, those days are long gone.

 

In the age of the internet, if a stock library is getting an extra 15% from distributors they may get more by translating their site, enlarging their collection to appeal to local markets, and doing some local promotion in those smaller markets. Stock libraries can do local promotion with one freelancer in a back bedroom, on commission, resident in the foreign market, promoting the translated main site. To Alamy’s credit it is doing something like this in some markets.

 

However once the distributor genie is out of the bottle, it is hard to put back.

 

Distribution works best for medium sized companies, having well edited collections, vastly smaller than here (perhaps somewhere between 250k and 1m). Proper editing and, in some cases, art direction, means that you don’t get endless replication of unsalable material, photographers are given the space to specialise without finding that the agency is letting in a lot of work in that is very similar to theirs. In my case RM material is properly managed, and buyers can't just click around to find the best deal. RF is a different matter: but here pricing is more standardised. And the proof of the pudding is in the eating: a ton of sales for a modest collection.

 

As it happens I also work for one of the majors which spends its profits on manning the globe. Even this agency finds it necessary to use some partner agencies - I doubt they do that just for the heck of it.

[John Mitchell]

I agree with Bill's assessment, distribution has made it virtually impossible for the big, generalist stock agencies to maintain a distinctive brand. It's interesting to see that many agencies now have exactly the same homepage layout, as if they actually want to be indistinguishable from each other.  I guess there is some logic behind this. Grocery stores sometimes use the same copycat strategy. You think that you are buying your lettuce at Wong's Market, when in reality you're shopping in Lee's Market that just opened up across the street.

[Robert Brook]

I agree with Bill's assessment, distribution has made it virtually impossible for the big, generalist stock agencies to maintain a distinctive brand. It's interesting to see that many agencies now have exactly the same homepage layout, as if they actually want to be indistinguishable from each other.  I guess there is some logic behind this. Grocery stores sometimes use the same copycat strategy. You think that you are buying your lettuce at Wong's Market, when in reality you're shopping in Lee's Market that just opened up across the street.

 

"generalist stock agencies ...a distinctive brand" - not sure whether that is an oxymoron, John.  Anyway we are coming to the fag end of big generalist macro agencies.  As the tendency is for mediocre imagery to be sold as microstock, conditions are becoming increasingly favourable for the small, although maybe not quite so small as in the past.  This is where all the distinctiveness and creativity is now, not to mention actual earnings.  The big agencies are increasingly becoming distributors, essentially selling machines.  What do you find at the top of many searches here, particularly creative ones?  Agencies.   At Getty and Corbis it is hard to distinguish between their own collections, appearing as virtual agencies, and external agency collections. 

[John Mitchell]

 

I agree with Bill's assessment, distribution has made it virtually impossible for the big, generalist stock agencies to maintain a distinctive brand. It's interesting to see that many agencies now have exactly the same homepage layout, as if they actually want to be indistinguishable from each other.  I guess there is some logic behind this. Grocery stores sometimes use the same copycat strategy. You think that you are buying your lettuce at Wong's Market, when in reality you're shopping in Lee's Market that just opened up across the street.

 

"generalist stock agencies ...a distinctive brand" - not sure whether that is an oxymoron, John.  Anyway we are coming to the fag end of big generalist macro agencies.  As the tendency is for mediocre imagery to be sold as microstock, conditions are becoming increasingly favourable for the small, although maybe not quite so small as in the past.  This where all the distinctiveness and creativity is now, not to mention actual earnings.  The big agencies are increasingly becoming distributors, essentially selling machines.  What do you find at the top of many searches here, particularly creative ones?  Agencies.   At Getty and Corbis it is hard to distinguish between their own collections, appearing as virtual agencies, and external agency collections. 

 

 

Yes, it was a bit of an unintentional oxymoron. There are challenging and interesting times ahead, for sure. A couple of things that do set Alamy apart from the other big guys are its philanthropy and overall fairness to its contributors. The latter is getting increasingly hard to find.