MicrostockGroup
Agency Based Discussion => Alamy.com => Topic started by: Microbius on March 18, 2009, 13:26
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Dear Alamy contributor,
We have seen some dramatic declines with some of our newspaper customers this quarter, ranging from 30% to 70% down year on year. I would like to share some thoughts with you on how we can reverse this trend.
I have spent the past week visiting photo editors and managing editors at several of the major UK titles to get a better understanding of why this is happening and where they see their businesses going.
All of the people I met with made the following observations:
- Advertising revenues have fallen dramatically this quarter in most cases
- Print sales have been falling and will continue to do so
- Online versions of newspapers have yet to deliver a revenue stream comparable with that of print
- Most titles have been making redundancies in recent months
- Editorial budgets have been cut
- Further editorial cuts are anticipated
Newspapers are going through a painful transition period that is being exacerbated by the recession. Most of the main titles think they will survive, but it is not yet clear what the right commercial structure for them will be. The only thing that is certain is that difficult choices and further cost reductions lie ahead of them.
Alamy is the only large supplier of imagery not offering a subscription scheme to newspapers and we are being squeezed out of this market by offerings from our largest competitors. These deals are in addition to, and separate from, newswire subscriptions. In the past we have managed to keep away from these deals because we represent a lot of material that isn't available anywhere else. Unfortunately the recession is forcing a change in behaviour at the picture desks that leaves little opportunity for image providers who don't offer unlimited downloads for a fixed fee. To put this in context, our largest UK newspaper customer has ordered their picture desk to only download images from agencies they have subscription deals with.
To keep our newspaper revenues alive this year we will have to move quickly to regain the ground lost to our rivals. The good news is that it's not too late to act - most of our customers want us to succeed because they like the speed, simplicity, and choice on Alamy.
Broadly speaking any subscription offering needs to be priced at or below the total expenditure for the previous year for an unlimited number of downloads. Wherever possible we will allocate revenue to contributors based on usage, but in some cases we may have to divide up the revenue based on downloads. It is hard to judge in advance what impact this will have on the average price per image for this market. At one end of the scale prices will remain at or slightly below 2008 prices, whereas at the other end prices might fall by up to 50% or perhaps even more. My expectation is that we will see a mixture of both.
We face a stark choice - either we adapt to match the competition, or we accept that UK newspaper revenue will continue to decline sharply over 2009.
Please feel free to email me at my personal email address - mailto:XXXXXX - if you have any concerns you would like to raise.
Best wishes,
James West
Alamy CEO
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OMG ;) First macro to fail into subs. Who's next
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Jupiter was doing subs for ages, and so has Getty for some select customers. No they are not the first.
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The costumers have money. It´s only the budgets adapting to the market ( subs). If You can get a BMW for 1000$ who would like a Nissan for 1500$.
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Why there is less advertising budget is explained in this video. Watch carefully
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AE-8lxwj48I[/youtube]
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The announcement is pretty open ended. I am guessing that it will be followed by another where they will clearly say how much are contributors going to get from sub sales.
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The newspaper market has been shrinking for years and they now have the option of using the micros, so it is no surprise that this is happening. Alamy has to adapt and I am pleased they are doing something instead of pretending this isn't a problem.
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Oh no. Now that I started building a portfolio at Alamy?
I hope they let us opt out. My images are not newspaperworthy anyway (except maybe on a travel article).
Regards,
Adelaide
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At least they showed some professionalism and explained the situation and asked for comments .....more than I can say about Fotolia :-\
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Being told my images are accepted into the Commercial Collection this morning.
Being told my images being added to a new subscription offering by the afternoon.
It's never a dull moment in stock photography! :-\
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Did I read that right that it's "unlimited"? A buyer pays and can download as much as they can grab?
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.
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OMG ;) First macro to fail into subs. Who's next
They're just trying to keep up with the rest of the bunch.. Their biggest income is editorial, and that is shrinking rapidly.. What would you do if you had to keep the company afloat? They have to be competitive to the market which is heavily getting pushed to lower price points and subs unfortunately..
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Would the market stop buying if we trashed subs. No!!! It would be a protest, but in the long run they´d adapt again. What comes after subs?
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Refreshing to see such openness of the situation. The more I learn about Alamy and their way of doing business, the more I like them.
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OMG ;) First macro to fail into subs. Who's next
They're just trying to keep up with the rest of the bunch.. Their biggest income is editorial, and that is shrinking rapidly.. What would you do if you had to keep the company afloat? They have to be competitive to the market which is heavily getting pushed to lower price points and subs unfortunately..
Haha I wouldn't asked 300$ for a simple photograph in first place. They seem to don't understand that if you tag "photos" on google image you probably hit 1 zillions files. Why in the world one photos would cost almost 0 and the other 300. Alamy accept everything anyway...
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What comes after subs?
Getting paid in Zimbabwe dollars and placement fees for the contributors. All you can download in a month for 1$. :P
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I just checked over the years I have had 67 sales at Alamy and only one was to a Newspaper. Mostly travel guides and school text books.
I suppose if they only allow subs to certain buyers such as Newspapers, it might not be too bad.
But as Dr Egon Spengler in Ghostbsuter said "print is Dead" back in 1984 books have a few more years in them but I think printed Newspapers are dying breed such as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer halts its print edition after 146 years
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There has been an update on this matter. At least we can opt out. It isn't clear if RM images will be part of the deal or not (they shouldn't).
http://www.alamy.com/Blog/contributor/archive/2009/03/19/4540.aspx
Regards,
Adelaide
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I don't have a portfolio at Alamy but do have an opinion ... how about that? 8)
Or maybe I don't ... is this JUST about editorial images or all images? Newspapers, as someone already mentioned, are not the sole users of editorial. And, newspapers do NOT survive on editorial images. They survive on Advertisers and commercial images. Editorial is simply the product they sell to attract advertisers.
I was doing editorial work when this (or something similar) happened in the 80s. Newspapers survived quite well but many, many magezines folded as advertisers cut back. Those that didn't fold cut back significantly on the number of pages (advertisements) in an issue.
It's a phase. :o
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OMG ;) First macro to fail into subs. Who's next
They're just trying to keep up with the rest of the bunch.. Their biggest income is editorial, and that is shrinking rapidly.. What would you do if you had to keep the company afloat? They have to be competitive to the market which is heavily getting pushed to lower price points and subs unfortunately..
well said. we all know what happened to the dinosaur ;)
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2nd email from Alamy.
A good example of how to communicate with contributors I think.
Dear Alamy Contributor,
Thank you for all of your thoughtful emails and comments on the blog. It's been very interesting to read your various perspectives and I appreciate your support in helping us find a workable solution.
Below are some of my thoughts in response to some recurring comments in your correspondence:
UK newspaper revenue for 2008 was about 1.8m USD (approx. 1.3m GBP), or 8% of our overall business.
Our assumption that the uniqueness of the images on Alamy enables us to keep away from subscription deals has been obliterated in recent weeks. Financial difficulties being faced by these customers have overridden the fact that Alamy has a better selection to offer than our competitors.
If we sit back and do nothing, over 1million USD in revenue will be wiped out over the next two years. That's an optimistic forecast - the truth is that we have no idea when or by how much this market will decline, but we know from recent experience that it has the capacity to fall dramatically and without warning.
Some of you are concerned that a subscription scheme will drive prices down to very low rates per image. In theory that's possible, but it's far from certain:
* Most newspapers are reducing the number of pages they print and are moderating their online ambitions due to budget constraints. I don't envisage that picture usage volumes in UK newspapers will increase significantly over the next couple of years. If anything, they will reduce.
* Alamy is already one of the leading suppliers of stock imagery to the UK newspaper market. Alamy's share of overall usage will likely increase if we do some deals, but not by a huge amount.
* 'Unlimited downloads' are the most generous terms we might offer. I don't want to run every commercial decision we make past all 17,000 of you, so I'm deliberately giving you the worst case scenario. In practice every customer is different, meaning that in some cases we might cap the number of downloads in order to preserve some lower limit on price per image.
I am not suggesting that we must compete head to head with newswire services. Nor am I suggesting that Alamy must transform the entire business into a subscription business, but for the UK newspaper business we must compete with other stock agency offerings - some of which come from agencies that also provide newswire services.
If you're still unconvinced, please send an email to [email protected] with the subject line "UK newspaper opt-out", and we will exclude your images from any deals we do with UK newspapers.
If you are going to take my offer of an opt-out, please do something for me in return: wait and see. Don't rule this out until you have had a chance to gauge the impact it will have on price and volume for yourself. You will be able to opt-out at any point in the future if you wish.
Apologies to those of you who would like an opt-in by pseudonym - I can't justify the engineering effort at this time.
Best wishes,
James
([email protected])
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I have a great deal of respect for Alamy. The way they handle such situations should be an example for some other companies. Like Fotolia which comes to mind as an opposite example of how not to deal with submitters.
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OMG ;) First macro to fail into subs. Who's next
They're just trying to keep up with the rest of the bunch.. Their biggest income is editorial, and that is shrinking rapidly.. What would you do if you had to keep the company afloat? They have to be competitive to the market which is heavily getting pushed to lower price points and subs unfortunately..
well said. we all know what happened to the dinosaur ;)
Dinosaur? What the comet or an asteroid? The sky IS falling? ;D
I've been trying to hold my fingers with all the negative people complaining, and not looking past the obvious down sides of this plan.
Not everyone will buy a subscription. We will still have on demand customers. You don't buy a dairy just because you need a gallon of milk each week! Low volume customers will still be buying on a basis of their needs.
This plan is targeting newspapers. Whether other clients will be able to subscribe, we don't know.
I'll assume that everyone here is selling photos on microstock for 25 cents to a dollar a download, then turning around and complaining because Alamy is going to sell their photos to more people at a higher rate?
Some people don't even sell editorial and they are complaining because Alamy is going to discount the rates that editorial customers will pay. This is an amusing contradiction in logic.
Alamy started out saying that the rates for subscription would be based on last years usage. I can't be sure, but it sounds like contracts with clients based on each ones individual needs and buying habits, not a wholesale discounting to anyone who drops down a check.
This could very well encourage the sales in the new US marketing expansion. That would mean more sales. Isn't that the whole Micro plan that most of us started with? Sales volume over high prices for limited sales.
Since buyers are getting a discount I'll hope they are paying in advance? I'd like to see Alamy drop the minimum level for payouts and stop the self reporting payments that take months or don't happen at all. Quicker payments for sales would be a welcome change.
If you don't like the new program, please opt out right now, before it's finalized or fully explained, everyone else will appreciate the reduction in competition and increase in sales. ;)
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totally, can't agree with Konstantin Sutyagin more. Here is a good example of communicating with your suppliers (contributors) and letting them in on issues facing the company/industries and asking for feedback before acting.
I only have 100 photos on Alamy and only been there for 6 months, have not sold a thing, but Alamy's management has my utmost respect!! as compared to you know which one making swift unilateral decisions every few months.
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( edited for brevity )
Dinosaur? What the comet or an asteroid? The sky IS falling? ;D
i'll assume that everyone here is selling photos on microstock for 25 cents to a dollar a download, then turning around and complaining because Alamy is going to sell their photos to more people at a higher rate?
If you don't like the new program, please opt out right now, before it's finalized or fully explained, everyone else will appreciate the reduction in competition and increase in sales. ;)
ditto ditto ditto :)
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( edited for brevity )
Dinosaur? What the comet or an asteroid? The sky IS falling? ;D
i'll assume that everyone here is selling photos on microstock for 25 cents to a dollar a download, then turning around and complaining because Alamy is going to sell their photos to more people at a higher rate?
If you don't like the new program, please opt out right now, before it's finalized or fully explained, everyone else will appreciate the reduction in competition and increase in sales. ;)
ditto ditto ditto :)
Did I leave out the rim shot after the first line? 8)
I'm just asking people to look at both sides, not just the negative.
ps I didn't get the email and I have over 1100 photos on Alamy. Why am I always the last one to find out. ;)
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ps I didn't get the email and I have over 1100 photos on Alamy. Why am I always the last one to find out. ;)
you are supposed to have gotten TWO emails . one came this morning to me . a followup of the first.
maybe your postman has gone on spring break ;D
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I got both emails. Maybe you have disabled them in your settings at Alamy (if there is such setting...)
Today there was a new post about RM imge sin the license scheme:
http://www.alamy.com/Blog/contributor/archive/2009/03/20/4611.aspx
In response to some of the comments received, we wanted to make our position clear on Rights Managed (L or RP) images. A newspaper downloading a Rights Managed image will only be able to use the image once.
We are not proposing that we turn RM images into RF images. This will be clear in the terms agreed with our newspaper customers. As we are only talking about a very small number of customers this will be a face to face negotiation and the terms of the agreement will be understood.
If a customer wishes to use an RM image in June that they downloaded and first used in May they will simply have to download the image again or alternatively Alamy will add a download to their June total.
A bit confusing to manage, since the newspaper will be downloading both RF and RM images as subs - who will control if the image is used more than once?
Payment conditions remain a mystery also, so my tendency is to opt out.