option 1 : Alamy is desperate and as a last chance is now begging for money, maybe they're already planning to sell out to Getty or whatever so they need to show potential buyers a sudden jump in sales.

option 2 : Alamy's buyers are cutting budgets to the bone and clearly told them they either slash prices or they will move to microstock.




in any case, it's BAD news for photographers !

the logic would be that the minimum possible price should be big enough to compensate for the production costs.
what we're seeing now instead is the minimum payout has been thrown out of the window even for RM so basically the whole model is crushing into itself as with RM you've almost no chance of selling the same image twice.

in a nutshell, it will be soon impossible to make a living out of RM alone unless the cost and time of editing/keywording is done by the agency and this is never gonna happen with Alamy.

sure, there will be maybe a bit more sales as the product is cheaper but overall photographers will earn less, exactly like on micros but without the benefits of micros.

Since there are hardly any sales there, it doesn't matter, doesn't much influence anything.

it will influence the whole industry.
this is nothing more than a race to the bottom.

i see it more as a reflection of the whole industry. too many agencies, too many images available. there has been a downward trend in the valuation of images since the inception of microstock with the attitude that it is better to sell a lot more for a lot less. the real kiss of death is subscription sites. lot's of great work available for next to nothing and the buyers have gravitated towards this, thus any agency that is not selling for peanuts simply can't compete with this. why would any buyer purchase an image for $10 when they can get it for $5? this only creates an environment that those selling their images for $10 must drop their prices to $5 to 'compete', thus becoming the new norm. the whole industry is in a really sad state of affairs in my view, and it is the contributors that will feel it the most. agencies like SS, GI, IS and the like will make millions to our demise. never has it been easier to make money from your photos as technology has enabled everyone to take a decent shot, the lack of editing has enabled everyone to get in on the action in one form or the other, the result is a market that is over saturated with imagery hence the rapid devaluation of the financial worth of imagery. the whole industry has been on a race to the bottom since the inception of microstock, with virtually every agency out there following suit to lower prices just to keep in the game. it's only a matter of time before we are all happy to make 0.38 per sale. it's already started and like fools we keep feeding into it.

Quote from: topol on September 15, 2013, 03:26

Since there are hardly any sales there, it doesn't matter, doesn't much influence anything.

it will influence the whole industry.
this is nothing more than a race to the bottom.

I've mentioned this before in MSG that Alamy would have no choice but to join the club and shave pricing significantly to compete with the micros. I predict that we will see yet another commission grab to the tune of 10%, making it 60% for Alamy and 40% for us, then another one later that gets us to 30%.  The momentum to the bottom is simply impossible to stop unless all of us contributors are willing to pull our ports and leave them only on GL & P5.  That will never happen.  So like many have said, it's up to us to find alternative income sources for our work. Feeding the MS beast isn't going to stop and the more photo mills upload similar, competitive content, sales themselves will continue to dilute. Then it becomes how much is enough? Honestly, some in here have said enough contributors will be happy with a penny per download and I happen to believe that. 

I am going on assignment in Fiji in a few months and with all the gear I am hauling and the complex arrangements to dive pearl farms and get "behind the scenes" I am at this point uncertain whether I will use any of the work for MS.  I think for me that POD and video are more lucrative revenue pipelines, along with RM (even though Alamy is cutting some RM pricing).  Here's a picture I just shot a few weeks ago that reminds me of the MS industry (it's a great white shark).

Alamy pricing is a puzzle. I don't think anything has sold at the "list price" for me, so unless they take the same massive discounts on the new pricing as they did on the old, it seems irrelevant.

I'm all RF so this doesn't affect me.  But for all practical purposes, Alamy prices are completely arbitrary.   Some sales are for $5, some for $100, we never know why.  It doesn't matter what their web site says, or what "discounts" they advertise.   

I don't think alamy will cut commissions percentages any time soon.  They wouldn't be worth using for any less than they pay now.  Only the sites that sell a lot can get away with it.  It would kill alamy, as the decent commission is the only thing that makes a lot of us bother with them.  Now prices are being cut, there's no way they would be able to justify another commission cut.

If they could increase sales volume and contributors earnings a lot, they could get away with cutting commissions again but that looks a long way off.  I'm not sure they will ever want to pay less commission percentages than they do now, as it would make them even more like Getty and then what would be the point of alamy?

Sharpshot, some contributors including myself, have very unique RM images which will not sell in volumn. I would have agreed with you if we were talking about RF images. Alamy's move is certainly not a postive sign.

It's weird that this has hardly been commented on over there.
You'd think it would deserve a thread of its own.

Quote from: ShadySue on September 19, 2013, 08:39

It's weird that this has hardly been commented on over there.
You'd think it would deserve a thread of its own.

their forum is dead, it's the usual dozen guys still writing there.

They usually have opinions about this sort of thing, though.

I used to shoot with Alamy in mind for potential usages.  These days, I shoot with other agencies in mind and submit whatever I've shot to Alamy.

What convinced me was when an editor for live news indicated my news images relating to a decision by a United States Federal Judge were not newsworthy and took them off the live news feed because they were "too stocky" (I was standing next to a Fox News Van when I shot the images - Fox news reported with similar images to mine).  Alamy felt the weather in the UK and a Joe Satriani concert were more newsworthy that day.

Thank goodness I also submit to Corbis....they picked up the same images and pushed them to their customers. 

Unfortunately, they are loosing touch with their contributors and they've lost touch with their customers.

I just use Alamy as a dump, if they sell, good, if they don't sell, no problem.

As for Corbis, believe it or not i'm seeing very good things on their spin-off Demotix, when they do have good coverage of news event they indeed sell and they end up on the all the top newspapers and this is something that wasn't happening before the Corbis buyout.

It seems I am taking this approach too with them, however what is better for "dump" - rm of rf in there?