Cryptoprocta Posted December 28, 2017 Share Posted December 28, 2017 50 minutes ago, Betty LaRue said: When you go to a botanical garden where the plants are labeled, take a picture of the plant, then a picture of the label, then a 2nd shot of the plant. Maybe a vertical and a horizontal. If you sandwich the label, there is no doubt what plant the label belongs to. Betty Great idea, just be sure to cross check if there's any possibility that the label might not be the plant you photographed, e.g. maybe someone tripped over it so that it looks like it is labelling a different plant. Same in e.g. zoos: sometimes an animal might be temporarily in another enclosure, but the labels haven't been switched. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Mitchell Posted December 28, 2017 Share Posted December 28, 2017 1 hour ago, Brasilnut said: I'm just playing devil's advocate. Outside the ethics if it's right or wrong or bad for the industry, I'm interested to know what would make us more money in the end from a practical point of view. Personally, I want to educate myself to earn enough to keep me out of the pointless rat race corporate world, of which I've not enjoyed the experience. Interesting discussion. ----------- I've always felt that way myself -- i.e. the rat race is one race you want to lose. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rick Lewis Posted December 28, 2017 Share Posted December 28, 2017 There is another angle that we may all be missing in this conversation and that is the ease at which a client can quickly choose, and purchase, a RF image vs a RM image. One basically needs only to know the size of the image one needs to accomplish their publishing goal. However, take a look at all the data required for a RM license, and time is money. Most clients know they will not need, nor be using, the image purchased for decades to come. I don't think that is an overriding factor. Trying to figure out the exact number of times the image may be reproduced can, I'm sure for some, be a rather difficult calculation. With RF, its easy. Many customers will lie about it anyway, or their thinking what if we need to use the image for a slightly longer period or perhaps a second run of products etc. RF is just easier. RF makes all these decisions and choices so much easier for the customers / end user. I would dare say most RF purchases sit on a hard drive somewhere and collect dust after the initial use. My feeling is, and always has been, RF images should sell for a higher price than what is listed currently. Someone earlier, perhaps in a different thread, wrote about a book cover sale that went for $7,000 US, I believe. It was a RM image. Let's just say J.K. Rowling uses an Alamy RF image for the cover of a new book. That $7,000 price tag would be reasonable, in my estimation, given the value of the print runs of her books. But even for a book cover, the printer wouldn't even need an image over 12MP, and what does that go for now RF; a couple of hundred dollars? None of us can ignore that the customer is now King & Queen. We really don't have much say in it any longer. I know if I were an art buyer or art director for a magazine etc, I would want to buy a RF image just for the sake of ease. I hate it, despise it or whatever but that won't change the market. Rick Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brian Yarvin Posted December 28, 2017 Share Posted December 28, 2017 16 hours ago, geogphotos said: From what people are posting here it seems that the image is more important than the licence. It would be interesting to see Bill's results since changing his whole collection to RF - how about posting your sales graph Bill? There should be an obvious increase in sales if what you contend is true that buyers have a clear preference for RF, otherwise if it is the image rather than the licence there will not be any significant change. Ian, in my experience, the image - or perhaps you could call it subject matter - isn't the most important thing, it's the only thing. I would bet that most of us would see little if any change in Alamy revenue because they changed images from RF to RM or vice versa. In my experience thusfar, the only way to make a difference is to shoot subjects that you haven't shot before. This doesn't mean traveling to different places, but rather, trying a whole new genre. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rick Lewis Posted December 28, 2017 Share Posted December 28, 2017 6 hours ago, geogphotos said: According to the data so far provided in this thread it seems that real buyers display behaviour different to that of the hypothetical buyers imagined by RF sellers. My guess is that the number one consideration is finding just the right image at the right price. Possibly, but consider two excellent images, side by side on Alamy that either will work in your publication. One you can get RF and the other RM, (same price), say to put on a travel website. You need only a small image that perhaps in the future you may want to use, I think RF wins. Perhaps that is why Alamy says they are getting so many RF requests that they make it the "default" submission choice. Just guessing but I do think it is a factor. I wish RF would just go away, but the trend does not seem to be going that direction. Rick Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Robert Shantz Posted December 28, 2017 Share Posted December 28, 2017 For what it's worth, I changed all of my photos to RF or RF Editorial early this year (2017). Prior to this change, RM probably accounted for 90% or so of the photos, but I don't have the exact number. I didn't make good notes of the dates, but basically from February through March. I did this based on Alamy's recommendation, and the fact that they allowed changes and added RF Editorial as on option. I didn't expect that I would see a statistically significant change, and that has been what has happened. But here are the numbers. Year Sales Gross Revenue (all numbers per Alamy's dashboard) 2012 64 6085 2013 40 2735 2014 37 3261 2015 25 1643 2016 62 3411 2017 65 3920 There is little difference between 2016 and 2017. However, just to confuse things, there are two additional possibilities. First, 2016 was a big recovery from 2015, so if this was a beginning of an uptrend then changing to RF might have stopped or reduced the expected increase. Second, the long term trend has been down, and 2016 could have been a fluke. Thus 2017 would have been expected to return to the long term downtrend and then the somewhat flat 2017 could represent a big increase from the expected downtrend as a result of changing to RF. For the first 3 months of 2017 (Jan - March), there were 6 RM sales for $202 and 5 RF sales for $465 -- but one RF for $365 really distorts these numbers. In short, my annual numbers have such a large variation that it would have taken a very great increase or decrease in sales and revenues to allow any meaningful statement as to the effect of my change to RF. I would hope that Alamy has generated meaningful numbers that together with actual feedback from customers led to their recommendations. Robert Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Mitchell Posted December 28, 2017 Share Posted December 28, 2017 I'm currently sitting on 136 sales (all RM) for 2017, which is 17 more than last year's total. I'd be very surprised if changing to RF Editorial would have produced an even better year given the nature of most of my images and the types of uses they license for, but everyone's collection is different. Some editorial images are probably (?) better suited to RF than others. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Betty LaRue Posted December 28, 2017 Author Share Posted December 28, 2017 Robert, thank you for that. What did you do about changing images that have been sold in the past as RM? Did you go through your port and separate those out or just make them RF editorial? I’ve been confused how to handle that. Betty Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Robert Shantz Posted December 28, 2017 Share Posted December 28, 2017 Betty, I started to separate out prior sales, especially those that had been renewed. But then I decided it was more trouble than it was worth since RF prices now seem to be competitive with RM, so someone renewing probably would get an RF image for the renewal price and not be unhappy. My highest RF as I mentioned was $365 gross / $182.50 net for RF Editorial Only. But I just had an unrestricted RF (animal) through a distributor for $3.39 gross, $1.02 net. Granted it was for only a 691 x 461 pixel size. When I first started with Alamy in 2006, RF prices were generally much higher than RM prices for editorial use, but that doesn't really seem to be the case any more. I've always hoped for the lucky high dollar commercial RM sale, but in 11 years I haven't had one so losing that possibility probably doesn't hurt me. As an aside, I've never really liked the idea that images could be restricted from commercial use based on their marginal content -- that ought to be up to the end user. For example, a photo of a mountain lake in a national forest would be marked as no model release if fishermen on the far bank could be seen at 100%. But the photo would be perfectly acceptable for commercial use at a lower size where the fishermen would be at most colored dots, and probably cloned out anyway. Robert Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cryptoprocta Posted December 28, 2017 Share Posted December 28, 2017 4 hours ago, Robert Shantz said: For what it's worth, I changed all of my photos to RF or RF Editorial early this year (2017). Prior to this change, RM probably accounted for 90% or so of the photos, but I don't have the exact number. I didn't make good notes of the dates, but basically from February through March. I did this based on Alamy's recommendation, and the fact that they allowed changes and added RF Editorial as on option. I didn't expect that I would see a statistically significant change, and that has been what has happened. But here are the numbers. Year Sales Gross Revenue (all numbers per Alamy's dashboard) 2012 64 6085 2013 40 2735 2014 37 3261 2015 25 1643 2016 62 3411 2017 65 3920 Hmmm, I'm obviously doing something far wrong. I'm selling only RM here, and my rpd is vastly lower than yours (e.g. 2016: 76 sales $1785 gross; 2017: 92 sales, $2288 gross*, per Alamy's dashboard). As several of my sales are repeat uses, and from yours and Reimar's figures above showing average RF sales to be hardly above his RM sales, I can see I'd have earned even less if my files had been RF, as I wouldn't have had the repeat sales. RF is clearly worth it for the buyers, but unless the price for RF is well above the simple RM price, it can't work long term/sustainably for suppliers. *Not the whole story, as this includes a lot of unreported uses for years back from the Muddle Group. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Betty LaRue Posted December 28, 2017 Author Share Posted December 28, 2017 18 minutes ago, Robert Shantz said: Betty, I started to separate out prior sales, especially those that had been renewed. But then I decided it was more trouble than it was worth since RF prices now seem to be competitive with RM, so someone renewing probably would get an RF image for the renewal price and not be unhappy. My highest RF as I mentioned was $365 gross / $182.50 net for RF Editorial Only. But I just had an unrestricted RF (animal) through a distributor for $3.39 gross, $1.02 net. Granted it was for only a 691 x 461 pixel size. When I first started with Alamy in 2006, RF prices were generally much higher than RM prices for editorial use, but that doesn't really seem to be the case any more. I've always hoped for the lucky high dollar commercial RM sale, but in 11 years I haven't had one so losing that possibility probably doesn't hurt me. As an aside, I've never really liked the idea that images could be restricted from commercial use based on their marginal content -- that ought to be up to the end user. For example, a photo of a mountain lake in a national forest would be marked as no model release if fishermen on the far bank could be seen at 100%. But the photo would be perfectly acceptable for commercial use at a lower size where the fishermen would be at most colored dots, and probably cloned out anyway. Robert Thanks again. I had one nice commercial sale for between $500-$1000. One of my homemade cream pies. Packaging. And that was years ago. I’ve been baking and snapping ever since, but no love. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rick Lewis Posted January 1, 2018 Share Posted January 1, 2018 On 12/28/2017 at 09:53, geogphotos said: Brian wrote: I would bet that most of us would see little if any change in Alamy revenue because they changed images from RF to RM or vice versa. Rick wrote: One you can get RF and the other RM, (same price), say to put on a travel website. You need only a small image that perhaps in the future you may want to use, I think RF wins What we need is the sort of data that Bill has because he changed a very large number of images from RM to RF long enough ago for any change in sales to show. Bill? That would be very interesting to see. Even without actual $, €, or £ amounts but the percentages of change, would really be helpful. This RF vs RM issue is becoming more blurred every day for me. This year out of my whopping 3 sales, one was for RM, $125 gross with rights granted that read like RF, (unlimited time, use, placement etc). I just had a RF image sell on the 30th. The terms were defined as such: Usage: iQ sale: Single company, editorial magazine, print and or web, multiple use 5 years, which has some elements of RM in the licensing. Honestly, I give up. I don't really think what we use as a "default" when we upload matters. Alamy will fashion the best license they think they can for maximum profit. My only complaint is that if one tends not to value their own work (product), no one else will. Asking too low of a usage fee to start, is sending the wrong message to buyers. I would love to see the advertised prices go up a bit. Who knows, maybe by starting the negotiations at a higher level will lead to higher revenue for all. Rick Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.