So far im waiting on some payments from back in october to clear. I know alamy tends to run a little slower then the other sites with getting funds to clear, but is this normal? Thought normally its only 30-90 days, not almost half a year.

I had one that was over a year old. I wrote to Alamy and they said they were still trying to get it. Either they finally did, or else they erased it from the records.

I recently had another go around over an image I found in use (article dated 2 months earlier) that hadn't shown up as a sale. They told me they did have a "relevant download" for the image and would contact the account manager.  After another month I contacted Alamy again; they said they'd chased the account manager. When the sale finally showed up March 2nd, it was at the 40% royalty rate rather than the 50% it would have been had the customer reported the sale promptly.

That's horrible and unfair: I'd definitely take that up with them, even if just to make them justify themselves and see what they say.

Currently waiting 12 months for one of their so called distributor sales after writing to them twice and getting the usual canned responses.

I've also got 2 distributor sales from October 2018.

To be honest the whole Alamy credit control system is a joke and so is the recording of sales which appears to rely on some form of honesty system where the customer reports which images they used.

As for Jo Ann's case that is beyond the pale with 40%.  They should be giving her the 50% she would have got if the sale had been reported promptly.

To be honest the whole Alamy credit control system is a joke and so is the recording of sales which appears to rely on some form of honesty system where the customer reports which images they used.

Obviously, it would be to Alamy's advantage as a USP (if not Unique at least Unusual).
However, like I keep saying, like a scratch on a record, the real problem with that system is that if we catch out people using images without reporting them, Alamy just bills them their current discounted rate, not even the rate they'd have paid at the time.
IMO, they should bill them at the very least at the 'rack rate', meaning the file page price for their usage.

OTOH, I had a particular pnewspaper group which used one of my RM pics c40 times, but hadn't reported 22 of them. I had to trawl though all I could find online and fill in a spreadsheet and send it to Alamy. Took a long time, as it started with a Google reverse search. Anyway, I got a canned reply to say my file was in the system, and ominously not to contact them again. After some months, I contacted them again to ask when it was going to be cleared, and they said they'd had changes in personel, my spreadsheet was back in the system, not to contact them again on that issue. Exactly the same story when I contacted them for the third time (so they had two complete changes of personnel within a year? Really? Not sure whether it's more worrying if that's true or if it wasn't true.)
Anyway, eventually I was paid, at that group's discounted rate, which was half what they'd paid the last time I had the file reported.
However, the group must have taken the huff about being called out, because almost immediately, they moved to SS - though I see they are coming back to Alamy: presumably SS just doesn't have the range of editorial images they need. I'm guessing in this climate it's really difficult to keep clients. One might argue that this sort of client isn't one they need, and although I was the one who spent the hours looking for and recording the sales, Alamy had to spend time matching up the sales with the reported records, so identify which ones had or had not been reported (I got that info back), so that took up a staffer's time.

BTW, another unreported reuse of one of my RM files was by the magazine of ... the NUJ (National Union of Journalists), who surely should know better. (They are a lower-volume buyers, I guess: the sale was a much higher value than under the UKNS.

Quote from: ShadySue on March 05, 2019, 20:18

...even if just to make them justify themselves and see what they say.

I'll let you know when they reply.

Please do. Makes me wonder if Alamy will ever go to direct pay or 30 days, not some larger customer who drags out their debts for over a year. No $4.98 isn't going to change my life, but there's a business like function and Alamy leaves us out in the cold because customers are slow to pay?

Quote from: ShadySue on March 06, 2019, 06:23

Quote from: Sammy the Cat on March 06, 2019, 00:03

To be honest the whole Alamy credit control system is a joke and so is the recording of sales which appears to rely on some form of honesty system where the customer reports which images they used.

...they said they'd had changes in personel...

The only changes in personnel needed at Alamy HQ is the management. They have proven their lack of competent decision making at every level. How Alamy continues to exist in 2019 is beyond comprehension, dumb luck I suppose. No regrets about severing ties with these clowns.

Who do you think more worthy of keeping ties at?

"...really sorry..."

"...calculated at time of invoice ..."

"...industry standard..."

If Alamy were the entire industry, that last one would be true...

Points for promptness and saying sorry, but their business model is broken, IMO. If I hadn't chased them up, twice, it's not even clear to me that I would ever have been credited for this at all.

It's as if being an Alamy customer is a combination insurance policy and lottery scheme - you use the image and may not ever have to pay for it; if you do get caught, Alamy Insurance gives you legal cover that it was a licensed use and the privilege of paying months or years after the image use.

I'd stick an email direct to the CEO James West it's really not acceptable

Quote from: ShadySue on March 06, 2019, 14:33

Quote from: Daryl Ray on March 06, 2019, 08:31

Quote from: ShadySue on March 06, 2019, 06:23

Quote from: Sammy the Cat on March 06, 2019, 00:03

To be honest the whole Alamy credit control system is a joke and so is the recording of sales which appears to rely on some form of honesty system where the customer reports which images they used.

...they said they'd had changes in personel...

The only changes in personnel needed at Alamy HQ is the management. They have proven their lack of competent decision making at every level. How Alamy continues to exist in 2019 is beyond comprehension, dumb luck I suppose. No regrets about severing ties with these clowns.

Who do you think more worthy of keeping ties at?

Companies that aren't compete idiots about image review, that can handle communication civilly, and that actually make somewhat regular sales. Companies that can actually pay their contributors their share in a reasonable amount of time (when the honest customers choose to report their purchases and pay, considering Alamy is using some sort of freaking "honor system" that their customers are clearly taking advantage of). Companies that don't force us to do all sorts of extra work doing reverse image searches and sending multiple emails on our end making sure they aren't complacently giving away our photos, only to heavily discount those sales or pretend they happened after the 20% royalty cut, just to screw us even further. Pretty much every other company does everything they do better than Alamy does.

Don't get me wrong, we are all in a desperately short supply of bonafide honest, fair, and competent stock companies. Mostly by our doing since so many allow the worst ones (ie iStock) to continue ruining the industry. Alamy could be so much better, but they need to get management that aren't shockingly incapable of making any correct decisions.

Yeah, yeah, I get all that. For me, it's just a matter of different people being willing to put up different sorts of cr*p. I'm not convinced any of them are much better than the rest, when you take everything together into consideration (I mean in the micro universe, not talking about macros).
I really wanted to know which specific companies you think are better than Alamy.

So its just coincidence that the top companies being so badly run make the most money for themselves and contributors?  As someone else said "show me the money". If they bring home the cash I can put up with a lot. No so much an agency that pays out 80% treats me like a god and sells nothing.

After over 19 months of waiting for earnings to be cleared (they are still not cleared) now I am waiting for more than one week for a human reply (not the robotic one they send) to see if I will ever have those earnings cleared. I don't know if I should laugh or cry. 

Oh, that's very unusual. You might not always get the answer you want, but you usually get a prompt reply on weekdays. Try again?

still waiting, about a year. will try to contact them soon