Critcal Mass

[andremichel]

52 minutes ago, Doc said:

Hi Andrew!

 

Don't really know - I think my rank improved during that time, though it is now about the same as it was then (top of p4 for anyone still looking at BHZ!)

 

Kumar

Well whatever you did, keep doing it!

[andremichel]

53 minutes ago, GS-Images said:

 

Competition isn't the same as "numbers available". Those who know what they're doing aren't worried about numbers available on Alamy.

 

That may have some truth to it if you have a high rank. You don't worry about how many images are behind you in a search.  But even for those "who know what they are doing", over time the number of images from competitors, who also know what they are doing, increases.

 

[ACC]

I’m curious about repeat sales for those of you selling volume and regularly. Is it the same pictures selling over and over or a different pattern?

[Martin B]

2 hours ago, andremichel said:

How come you are selling 3x as many with only 2.2x the images of 2012, while the competition had grown from 25 million to 125 million?

I think that 125 million number will have less of a negative impact in way of sales if a person isn't shooting common or popular subject matter. In some cases, that large number may actually help sales, as Alamy's client base continues to grow as a result of the larger library.

[MandyD]

16 minutes ago, Martin B said:

I think that 125 million number will have less of a negative impact in way of sales if a person isn't shooting common or popular subject matter. In some cases, that large number may actually help sales, as Alamy's client base continues to grow as a result of the larger library.

that being said, do you vets notice more and more North American clients coming on over the last few years as far as print goes?

[Martin B]

7 hours ago, Richard Baker said:

I could tell you that with 20k images on here with an average of 200 sales a year.

 

My point is, any of our collections are inevitably going to be different so the idea of average here is pretty innacuate, given our subject/interest bias. 

 

 

That wasn't the question. The question was, at what point did you start getting regular sales? It didn't happen when you uploaded your first image, and it didn't wait until you topped 20K. At some point in between, there must have been a period when sales started coming in on a steady basis.

[andremichel]

39 minutes ago, Martin B said:

I think that 125 million number will have less of a negative impact in way of sales if a person isn't shooting common or popular subject matter. In some cases, that large number may actually help sales, as Alamy's client base continues to grow as a result of the larger library.

I agree that images of London tourist sites for example have grown exponentially while far less obvious subjects have increased much more slowly.

 

I picked one of your subjects 'Carolina duck', which I imagine isn't considered very common or extremely popular amongst Alamy contributors. 

 

Currently there are 1226 images, with 729 images added since Jan 1st 2013. Not quite trebled but still a lot of new competition since 2012.   

 

[Martin B]

19 minutes ago, andremichel said:

 

'Carolina duck', which I imagine isn't considered very common or extremely popular amongst Alamy contributors. 

 

Currently there are 1226 images, with 729 images added since Jan 1st 2013. Not quite trebled but still a lot of new competition since 2012.   

 

Type in the more common name, wood duck, and over ten thousand images show up. Either way, none of my images of that subject show up on the first 3 pages, which pretty much dooms them into obscurity. 

[John Richmond]

Based on the last three months figures I've reached the 5+ sales per week mark (76 in 13 weeks).  I'd been nudging it in the second half of last year but this last quarter sealed it.  Critical mass hit at about 4500 uploaded images. Hopefully it will continue.  Here's the figures for the last year.

 

 

For me it's been a steady increase year on year since I started on Alamy in Jan 2014.  A number of  things have helped.

• I've uploaded continuously during that time
• I've specialised in areas where I have detailed knowledge - botanical, horticultural, macro wildlife and nature.  More general shots are a small proportion of my portfolio - though I'll take them if opportunity presents
• Because of my specialisation I have a good number of subjects where a search only shows my images or mine and those of one or two other contributors.  Last month, for example, I had 5,551 views.  Looking at the pseudonym summary and sorting by Total Views the first 200 search terms show totals of less than 100 images found.  (The first two on the sort have Total views of 1 - both mine, of course.)  In many cases I'm not competing against 125 million other images - I'm competing against a comparative few.  More to the point, the images of obscure subjects are in demand by Alamy buyers.  They wouldn't be searching for them unless that was the case.
• The last time I had zero sales in a month was Jan 2015 and I've sold increasing numbers year on year.  Because of increasing sales my rank has improved with each rerank - which means extra visibility and increasing zooms - which means more sales.  An upward spiral.

This is only one strategy for sales - but it's worked for me.*

 

*Although prices could be better.

 

 

[RedSnapper]

1 hour ago, John Richmond said:

  In many cases I'm not competing against 125 million other images

 

 There's never a time when you're competing with the entire Alamy collection. That would genuinely  be a lottery...

 

As you point out, in all cases you're in competition with a much much much smaller pot of images..... some thousands in most cases, often hundreds, and in some cases down to a few  tens ....

 

That's the secret of success. Forget the 'big picture' and concentrate on what you can do something about

 

km

 

and you can have that advice for free.

I don't often have blank sales days....no more than a fistful this year to date

[M.Chapman]

1 hour ago, Martin B said:

That wasn't the question. The question was, at what point did you start getting regular sales? It didn't happen when you uploaded your first image, and it didn't wait until you topped 20K. At some point in between, there must have been a period when sales started coming in on a steady basis.

 

I expect that sales examined on a weekly basis will never be "steady", especially if the average is only 5 per week. Look over a longer period (Monthly-Quarterly-Annually) and it starts to make more sense. There are too many random factors to give "steady" results unless averaged over a much higher level of sales or time period.

 

Mark

[John Mitchell]

3 hours ago, ACC said:

I’m curious about repeat sales for those of you selling volume and regularly. Is it the same pictures selling over and over or a different pattern?

 

I'm not exactly a "volume" seller (I average 10-12 sales per month), but I'd say that roughly 50% of my licenses are repeat sellers. They are really important for generating regular income. The first image that I sold on Alamy back in 2007, when I started submitting, still licenses now and then.

[Lisa]

Oops, I'm on the wrong thread. Deleted.

[Chuck Nacke]

To the OP:  In my opinion there is no "Critical Mass" Just "Critical Photos"

 

FYI I have NEVER "Sold" an image on Alamy, but for the last years Alamy

has licensed over 60 of my images a year.  When I started out with Alamy I kept

reading about having X thousand images, but I am still at less than 900 on

my main Psedonym.  Keep in mind that I am not a "Stock Photographer"  I've

been a working magazine photojournalist since 1980 and as my classic file

image distributors faded away I found myself looking for an outlet for the work

that I did over the decades.  Alamy actually found me, something I am very

lucky to have happened.

 

Again in my opinion and from my own experience,  Alamy is a great outlet

for editorial images that are well captioned and still in the news.

 

In other words it is NOT about numbers.  It is about images and world events.

I have images done over 20 years ago on film that I spent hours scanning, spotting

and researching the caption information.  Last month Alamy licensed an image

I shot for NEWSWEEK in 1980, the image was shot with a Leica M2 and a Canon

28 f2.5 on Kodachrome 64 and a image that I shot in 2017 with a NIKON D800

for a corporate client, the image shows one of the recent Trump appointees.

 

There is also a market for the "Stock" images, but I don't go there, but

I just turned 60 years old.......

 

I will add that "Stock and Alamy" for me is really just pub or gas money at this

point.  I make all of my money now doing corporate photography, but I am very

happy to be contributing to Alamy and hope to increase my images online as I
can.

[John Mitchell]

5 hours ago, GS-Images said:

 

Competition isn't the same as "numbers available". Those who know what they're doing aren't worried about numbers available on Alamy. I know I'm not. If I see 400,000 results, I won't think "no point adding an image of the same thing". That is the incorrect advice I often read here, but the fact is that if you know what you're doing and your rank is decent, you know that at least some of your images of any subject will appear on the first page of results.

 

Sometimes when checking whether my newly keyworded images are in the database yet, I use the "new" sort order option, and it often amazes me how many similar images just one person has uploaded in one batch. Do a search for those images though and most won't appear in results until the latter pages.

 

Geoff.

 

I agree, "no point adding an image of the same thing" is no longer good advice (perhaps it was once). It's such a fluid situation now that updating images -- especially of subjects that have licensed in the past -- is really important. Of course, having fun is even more important, but that's another story.

[spacecadet]

Eh?

The only visitor I see on your profile since Friday is Alamy.

[Craig Yates]

15 hours ago, GS-Images said:

 

I read that often and maybe it's true for some, but even on a bad month for me I'd get more than that.

 

Some with 2-3K images will license many more than some with 10-20K. Many upload huge numbers, spam keywords, don't bother with doing it all properly, and they just clog up Alamy and make very low sales for the volume of images they have.

 

Add variety, high quality, topical, concepts, think about tags & captions properly, and you'll do a lot better than 1 per 1000 per month.

 

All that advice for free too.  

 

Geoff.

 

Actually I gave you the red arrow for your assumption "Many upload huge numbers, spam keywords, don't bother with doing it all properly, and they just clog up Alamy and make very low sales for the volume of images they have.

Only a minute number of photographers report their sales numbers so how can you make the above statement.

Where is the rule on ALAMY that you have to generate a certain number of sales for a given size of portfolio.

 

 

Your red arrow and my reply was also free.

 

 

Craig

[John Morrison]

19 minutes ago, GS-Images said:

 

Do you expect me to just sit back and let people like you criticise me and make rude comments, and let you walk all over me, like a school bully? I know I'll get reds and warnings for this, and so be it, but as far as I'm concerned people like you don't belong here and Alamy should ban you again. It isn't up to me of course, I know that. You have a reputation both here and elsewhere and yet you carry on. You didn't need to get involved again this time, but you always feel the need to butt in and make a comment just to wind people up. It isn't only you of course but the odd disagreement like I just had with Craig is the way things sometimes go. I've had disagreements before and every one has blown over and is no longer an issue. I've even tried several times to make peace with you by making friendly comments to you directly, as a real genuine attempt to make things nicer and forgiving all your rudeness to me in the past. You always have to make a sarcastic come-back though, and will never let things drop, and you continue to stick your beak in every time. Then of course some others here who don't know what you're like will jump on me for posts like this one. Who is actually in the wrong though? What have I actually done other than not let those criticising me say whatever they like without any sort of comment?

 

No red from me, but, honestly, wouldn't it be better to log out of the forum than get so wound up?

[John Morrison]

I was thinking more about logging out for a few minutes... but hey...

[Doc]

16 hours ago, ACC said:

I’m curious about repeat sales for those of you selling volume and regularly. Is it the same pictures selling over and over or a different pattern?

It is both - there are some images that sell repeatedly - either those that represent popular editorial subjects, or those that some newspapers have decided are their "stock image" for a particular topic, and the same paper reuses them frequently. But other images sell as one-offs, and good ones again will repeat-sell

 

Kumar

[Doc]

16 hours ago, MandyD said:

that being said, do you vets notice more and more North American clients coming on over the last few years as far as print goes?

Yes, though the effect has not been large

 

kumar

[Martin B]

Did someone disappear? 

[Brian Yarvin]

On 4/2/2018 at 12:59, andremichel said:

 

That may have some truth to it if you have a high rank. You don't worry about how many images are behind you in a search.  But even for those "who know what they are doing", over time the number of images from competitors, who also know what they are doing, increases.

 

I'm not sure this is true in a meaningful way. For example, many who just did the easiest stuff will quit and their work will sink to the bottom (and out of the way). 

[andremichel]

26 minutes ago, Brian Yarvin said:

I'm not sure this is true in a meaningful way. For example, many who just did the easiest stuff will quit and their work will sink to the bottom (and out of the way). 

I don't understand what you are saying and what your point is in relation to what I said. 

[Martin B]

56 minutes ago, andremichel said:

I don't understand what you are saying and what your point is in relation to what I said. 

I think what he is saying, and it makes sense, is that for every serious contributor who knows what they are doing, there are probably dozens that upload a few hundred or less images, and then give up because they are not getting any sales right away or it is too much work.