Revenue Blip

[John Crellin]

Or was it just those of us who adopted IM / Tags for our whole portfolio early? (Or did I just have an isolated bad year...)

 

My revenue after 3 months of 2018 is back on par with 2016 leaving 2017 as a really bad downward blip (if it had continued like that I would give up.)

 

Basically I wanted to get the job done with the changes and had a lot of anomalous tags from the automatic conversion but I do wonder whether taking a longer view and waiting for Alamy to sort out issues would have been better!

 

 This is the revenue graph:

John Crellin

[Bryan]

I suspect that the variability is more down to the massive increase in the number of photos available on Alamy.

 

I saw an increase in earnings last year after spending ages tidying up keywords, but I don't think that the two are necessarily related. I'm seeing large swings from month to month in numbers sold and income. The whole thing feels more precarious.....

[John Crellin]

Thanks - I put it down to that at the time (I noticed after a 9 month break in uploading that the Alamy codes had moved way down the alphabet!)

 

So we will see if March has been an upward blip!

 

John

[Joseph Clemson]

John, your poor 2107 followed by an improved early part of 2018 is exactly the experience I have had. Nothing I did last year in tidying up keywords and making sure supertags were correct seemed to make any noticeable difference at the time. The improvement I am having this year seems to me to be down to tweaks in the Alamy systems which have swung slightly in my favour again.  Who knows how long it will last?

[Marb]

I have given up tweeking keywords etc as I have found my images easily in the search with no super keywords, or even basic titles which proves it has little or no effect. I also feel like giving up uploading for the poor returns I am getting for my efforts. Now I will put my tin hat on and wait for the inevitable repercussions from the usual forum members.

[spacecadet]

10 minutes ago, Marb said:

I have given up tweeking keywords etc as I have found my images easily in the search with no super keywords, or even basic titles which proves it has little or no effect. I also feel like giving up uploading for the poor returns I am getting for my efforts. Now I will put my tin hat on and wait for the inevitable repercussions from the usual forum members.

Images don't go on sale without a caption at all. Supertags put you higher up in a search, so unless you know how the other images in a search were tagged, you probably haven't proved anything.

Tin hat or not, if you make incorrect assertions you can expect to be put right.

[Cryptoprocta]

3 minutes ago, spacecadet said:

Images don't go on sale without a caption at all. Supertags put you higher up in a search ...

Maybe, but other factors (AR or ... ?) trump Supertags.

I've seen images at the top of searches with no tags, super or ordinary.

Above files with keywords and my own files which had supertags (I can't tell if other peoples' files in the search were supertagged).

[Marb]

1 hour ago, spacecadet said:

Images don't go on sale without a caption at all. Supertags put you higher up in a search, so unless you know how the other images in a search were tagged, you probably haven't proved anything.

Tin hat or not, if you make incorrect assertions you can expect to be put right.

I knew you wouldn’t disappoint. I didn’t say I didn’t have a caption, I said basic titles (caption) 

[M.Chapman]

2 hours ago, spacecadet said:

Supertags put you higher up in a search, so unless you know how the other images in a search were tagged, you probably haven't proved anything.

 

Indeed it's very difficult to prove anything. But I can tell from my own collection that images with supertags don't necessarily appear higher in search results than those that don't. There are other Alamy factors at play, which can override my efforts with tags, supertags and captions. One of my images of a particular subject appears above all my others, pretty much whatever I do to it, I even tried moving it to new pseudo. I'm in discussion with Alamy about this image at the moment. The image in question has never been sold, it has been zoomed, but then so have others in my portfolio that appear lower down. This particular images seems to have more than it's fair share of "Alamy's magic sauce" applied to it....

 

On average I'm sure super-tagged images beat tagged ones, but looking at individual images can easily lead to false conclusions. 

 

Mark

[spacecadet]

45 minutes ago, Marb said:

I knew you wouldn’t disappoint. I didn’t say I didn’t have a caption, I said basic titles (caption) 

You may have meant to say with no super keywords, or with basic titles

but what you said was

with no super keywords, or even basic titles

[RedSnapper]

On 05/04/2018 at 09:01, Bryan said:

I suspect that the variability is more down to the massive increase in the number of photos available on Alamy.

 

 

That would possibly explain the dip in 2017, but in that case  the figures for 2018  should be trending even more badly.....

As with John, the OP, I can see a relative improvement in my metrics for 2018 after a downturn in 2017......so there is some communality of experience

km