Alamy shows prices in $ for royalty free sales, but when I get a sale, the price shown in my sales report has (so far) never matched the displayed prices? Why is that?

So today I got a sale for the maximum size of an image for $200 (gross) but the site says it should cost $315. A few weeks ago, I sold something listed at $190 but the sale was for $152 (from which their 60.80 commission is deducted)

Do they just discount images for big customers? I thought that distributor sales would be shown as such and there's nothing indicating that was the case here. The amounts are too large to be currency issues.

Perhaps someone who has sold royalty free there for longer than me (I was just RM while exclusive) can explain how this works...

I thought that distributor sales would be shown as such and there's nothing indicating that was the case here. ..

It does say when it is distributor sales and you would know anyway as you get 40% commision instead of 60%

I had one RF sale and it matched with the prices on the image

Quote from: Poncke on November 28, 2012, 04:52

I had one RF sale and it matched with the prices on the image

I think that I've read that the negotiations are more likely with RM.

Oh ok, sorry I missed the part about RM. Yeah, the calculator is very off for what I understand. Alamy is negotiating deals to get sales, so giving away RM images for peanuts.

Thanks for the answers.

There's no calculator that I see for RF sales - just a list of prices based on size. The sale for $200 represents a 37% discount on the "list" price, which is a pretty hefty whack. When you combine big discounts with long waits for balances to clear, it does take some of the fun out the whole process

The only other observation is that I have no idea what possible value the chart that shows you your "zooms" is. I don't think anything I've sold this year has ever shown up as a zoom. As long as there are sales, I don't much care, but someone must have thought people zooming images meant something.

The only other observation is that I have no idea what possible value the chart that shows you your "zooms" is. I don't think anything I've sold this year has ever shown up as a zoom. As long as there are sales, I don't much care, but someone must have thought people zooming images meant something.

It's only a select group of Alamy's biggest buyers whose zooms show up in Measures.
Also now that they have a hover-enlarge thingy, zooms aren't so common.

It's a quaint site altogether.

Thanks for the answers.

There's no calculator that I see for RF sales - just a list of prices based on size. The sale for $200 represents a 37% discount on the "list" price, which is a pretty hefty whack. When you combine big discounts with long waits for balances to clear, it does take some of the fun out the whole process ...

Fun? doing stock? I must have missed out...

I had RF sales at Alamy for full resolution images with a discount of 95% - I kid you not!

Quote from: jsnover on November 28, 2012, 11:40

The only other observation is that I have no idea what possible value the chart that shows you your "zooms" is. I don't think anything I've sold this year has ever shown up as a zoom. As long as there are sales, I don't much care, but someone must have thought people zooming images meant something.

Zooms vs views give us a cross section of how our images and their keywords are performing. Zooms vs views is used to calculate the CTR which affects our search positioning. So we have a sense of how well (or how badly) our images are performing. If our images are showing up in lots of views but not getting zoomed then either they have been over enthusiastically keyworded or else maybe the images would be better moved to a different pseudonym - rather than dragging down our CTR and affecting our search placement.

Quite often newspaper sales show up first as a zoom. If I see that something has been zoomed which is probably a newspaper or syndicated sale then searching for the pseudonym in Google News often finds the use long before it is ever reported.

I think I have that keywording problem, but my days at Alamy have been counted already.

So today's gem is a sale of a small size - 758 x 505 pixels - royalty free (i.e. not Novel Use) for $7.83 - of which my 60% is $4.70. Not a horrible return for a regular license (i.e. not EL) but the "list" price on that size is $95! They're selling it at a 92% discount...

It beats the 31 cent royalty from Pocketstock, but that's really damning with faint praise.

So today's gem is a sale of a small size - 758 x 505 pixels - royalty free (i.e. not Novel Use) for $7.83 - of which my 60% is $4.70. Not a horrible return for a regular license (i.e. not EL) but the "list" price on that size is $95! They're selling it at a 92% discount...

It beats the 31 cent royalty from Pocketstock, but that's really damning with faint praise.

isnt it 50% ?

Quote from: jsnover on December 05, 2012, 00:48

So today's gem is a sale of a small size - 758 x 505 pixels - royalty free (i.e. not Novel Use) for $7.83 - of which my 60% is $4.70. Not a horrible return for a regular license (i.e. not EL) but the "list" price on that size is $95! They're selling it at a 92% discount...

OUCH!
Was that sold through the UK newspaper scheme? (that will show in the details).

I don't see anything referencing a UK newspaper scheme on the page "Summary of Items Sold". I find the maze of reports of what I've earned and which page has what detail very, very disorienting - so perhaps that's in some other report?

I don't see anything labeled "Usage" on the page www.alamy.com/stock-photography-contrib-sales-history.asp. It says Royalty Free in the license column and in the Details column:
 "1 MB
758 x 505 pixels
160 KB compressed"

Perhaps usage is only for RM sales? On my older (while exclusive) "Traditional License" sales I see a breakdown of Usage: xxx in the Details column

So today's new Alamy experience was an Alamy iQ sale. Royalty free, listed like this "Royalty-free  Usage: iQ sale: Corporate Package Use � Internal use and external non-advertising use". The gross was $76.72 & alamy took their 40%

So with an iQ sale, I apparently don't see any information about what size was purchased, so it's hard to say if this was a huge discount on a $365 sale or a small discount on a $95 sale. Has anyone else had an iQ sale on a royalty free image? I tried searching Alamy's forums but got a "runtime error" page. Is there any way (other than writing to support) to find out what size they got for $76.72?

Didn't notice this was new in Nov 2012, I must not be getting the news feed or I just missed it? Thanks!

http://www.alamy.com/Blog/contributor/archive/2012/11/15/5260.aspx

It appears that the buyers can see where something has been used or licensed before. I don't see where we can or ever did for RF?

The RF I've sold, list my file and the download size, nothing else?

30 MB
6750 x 1530 pixels
1 MB compressed

Can you explain the what size question? I may be missing it, but mine just show the file size, and nothing about the use size?

So today's new Alamy experience was an Alamy iQ sale. Royalty free, listed like this "Royalty-free  Usage: iQ sale: Corporate Package Use � Internal use and external non-advertising use". The gross was $76.72 & alamy took their 40%

So with an iQ sale, I apparently don't see any information about what size was purchased, so it's hard to say if this was a huge discount on a $365 sale or a small discount on a $95 sale. Has anyone else had an iQ sale on a royalty free image? I tried searching Alamy's forums but got a "runtime error" page. Is there any way (other than writing to support) to find out what size they got for $76.72?

I watched that video yesterday too - that's all I know about iQ other than a largely uninformative video for contributors on the subject. View it here if you have time to kill.

For RF, I can see that it would be useful to know that your company had already bought that item, so even if you don't have to pay for new uses, knowing that you already own it is helpful if the site wouldn't already tell you that. As far as keeping track of things you owned via other means, it sounds a bit like iTunes and building a cloud library that includes physical CDs you own. In that case you don't upload anything; they just note ownership. In the Alamy case, I can't see uploading images from my company to their site so that other divisions can download and use them, but perhaps that's what they're offering?

On the size question, what I see for a typical (not Novel Use) RF sale is the size the customer purchased as well as the price they paid. I've been looking to see how those prices matched up - or didn't - to the prices shown on the site. For the iQ sale, that size information was missing.

And on a different subject entirely, I had a sale yesterday where the price paid was higher than the list price for the size - $55.78 for a 450 x 300 pixel sale that "lists" for $49. If they'd like to do that with a $365 sale, that'd be fine with me

But I shouldn't complain too much - for December, Alamy comes in above BigStock and CanStock in the middle tier (unless there's another sale, 123rf is above them)

What is an iQ sale?

I got one today, RM, very wide usage and even any size, for just US$73.

What is an iQ sale?

I got one today, RM, very wide usage and even any size, for just US$73.

I got one too today. For $ 75.62

AIUI, though I could be wrong, an iQ sale would be a repeat use for a company so it would be discounted.
Though I've had very wide use and timescale qute a bit lower than that price, not IQ.

It's bad, but still better than having to join hundreds of small local agencies or distributors worldwide not to mention it would be impossible and time consuming and that it could take forever and that they could ask keywording in their own language.

As bad as it looks, it's still better than nothing.

Prices are going down everywhere for editorial because there's a real crisis in the print business.
Last i've heard yesterday was the Herald Tribune changing name and being soon sold as "NYT International Edition", this is a very bad sign of the times, it smell of last straw of desperation before closing the HT altogether and it's just a matter of time.

...they can't even be bothered to tell you how much you made on a sale (you need to substract their commission from the total; I assume they're hoping you won't notice the actual money in your pocket and focus on the gross number.

Only just now (literally, I was looking to see if I was over $175 to get a payment due tomorrow) I noticed a Net Revenue link in My Alamy, which has a 'due' column which tells you what you got - only for cleared sales.
As I just noticed it, I don't know how long that link has been there - I always subtracted the commissions from the total; though when it's a direct sale, nowadays it's the same as their split.

To round out the month, I received a distributor sale today - $26.46 for a 1580 x 1053 that "lists" for $190.

$26.46 was the gross. The distributor gets 40% off the top - $10.58 - and then Alamy and I split the rest, leaving me with $7.94

It doesn't list the distributor, so I have no way of knowing if this is just some Alamy subsidiary - which would then allow them to keep 70% of the total. If you ask Alamy will they tell you which distributor sold this image?

I want to like Alamy, but they take forever for sales to clear, their payout is $250 even though they're selling more and more cheaply, the discounting is massive and they can't even be bothered to tell you how much you made on a sale (you need to substract their commission from the total; I assume they're hoping you won't notice the actual money in your pocket and focus on the gross number.

Hi there,

Sorry to read about your frustration with Alamy - I'd just like to clarify a few points raised:

>> "I have no way of knowing if this is just some Alamy subsidiary - which would then allow them to keep 70% of the total"

All distributor sales are third party, meaning that the split goes 40% to distributor, 30% to Alamy, 30% to photographer. There are no exceptions to this with distributor sales.

>> "they take forever for sales to clear"

Unlike other agencies/portals, we report sales in real time. This means that you can see exactly when the sale was made and an invoice raised to the customer. A sale will clear when we have received payment from the customer and 45 days has passed since the time of invoice. A sale will take 45 days as this gives us a chance to offer a refund period to the customer, but also protect us against credit card fraud. Some invoices take longer than 45 days to clear if a customer doesn't pay on time. If this happens, our credit control team work around the clock to secure payment. Most other agencies only report the sale to you when the money is in their hands, making it appear as though their sales clear much quicker. The reality is that the timescales will be very similar to ours.

>>"their payout is $250"

Our payout threshold has been $175 for quite some time now.

>> " they can't even be bothered to tell you how much you made on a sale"

I can only presume that you are looking at the "summary of images sold" only. There are two sections of the site within "My Alamy" (that have always been available) that give you the full breakdown of your sales: Balance of Account and Net Revenue. If you look in Net Revenue, you can produce a report that breaks down everything from the image ref (Alamy ref and your ref), to the commission split, the price, the date of invoice and the date cleared etc. You can export all this and download to excel if you wish for your records.

Many thanks

James Allsworth
Content Executive

Alamy

Quote from: jsnover on February 27, 2013, 21:16

To round out the month, I received a distributor sale today - $26.46 for a 1580 x 1053 that "lists" for $190.

$26.46 was the gross. The distributor gets 40% off the top - $10.58 - and then Alamy and I split the rest, leaving me with $7.94

It doesn't list the distributor, so I have no way of knowing if this is just some Alamy subsidiary - which would then allow them to keep 70% of the total. If you ask Alamy will they tell you which distributor sold this image?

...

Hi there,

Sorry to read about your frustration with Alamy - I'd just like to clarify a few points raised:

>> "I have no way of knowing if this is just some Alamy subsidiary - which would then allow them to keep 70% of the total"

All distributor sales are third party, meaning that the split goes 40% to distributor, 30% to Alamy, 30% to photographer. There are no exceptions to this with distributor sales.

......

Many thanks

James Allsworth
Content Executive

Alamy

Why does the third party distributor get a bigger cut than the artist?

[Why does the third party distributor get a bigger cut than the artist?

Good point! I can imagine (putting words into Alamy's mouth) that they'd say this is the contract they have with distributors. Fair enough, but over the last several years, Alamy's commission has changed from 30% to 40% to (now) 50% and all of the change has come out of the contributor's hide.

Alamy revised the contract with contributors, with notice, and they can do the same with distributors. I think that the distributor should get a maximum of 25% of the gross - and if they want more money, sell more licenses.

I just went back to check and my first Alamy sale in 2007 had a commission for Alamy of 30% - I'm not making up numbers for rhetorical effect...

Quote from: jsnover on March 05, 2013, 15:46

Quote from: Poncke on March 05, 2013, 13:27

[Why does the third party distributor get a bigger cut than the artist?

Good point! I can imagine (putting words into Alamy's mouth) that they'd say this is the contract they have with distributors. Fair enough, but over the last several years, Alamy's commission has changed from 30% to 40% to (now) 50% and all of the change has come out of the contributor's hide.

Alamy revised the contract with contributors, with notice, and they can do the same with distributors. I think that the distributor should get a maximum of 25% of the gross - and if they want more money, sell more licenses.

I just went back to check and my first Alamy sale in 2007 had a commission for Alamy of 30% - I'm not making up numbers for rhetorical effect...

The commission on your first sale was actually 35% to Alamy in total. Our commission split back then (2007) was 65% to the photographer. It will be seen in your balance of account as 30% to Alamy then you will also see an account fee that is an additional 5% that takes the total to 35.

In order to be able to work with third party distributors, we have to negotiate the best deals possible and 40% is standard across the industry. Yes, it could be viewed as unfortunate that the distributor gets more than the artist but again, this is not an unusual trend in the industry. Indeed, I could mention many agencies that take more than the artist for direct sales, not even third party.

The pricing can be lower in these markets than what you would see in your primary markets but we also see very high value sales also.

It's also worth baring in mind that if you are not comfortable with the third party additional revenue opportunities you can opt out during the month of April.

Best wishes

James

And I will be doing this in a HEARTBEAT!!

Quote from: Alamy on March 06, 2013, 04:29

...Yes, it could be viewed as unfortunate that the distributor gets more than the artist but again, this is not an unusual trend in the industry. Indeed, I could mention many agencies that take more than the artist for direct sales, not even third party.
...

Thanks for the response. Regarding the other agencies taking more than 50% of direct sales, that's true, although some of us are slowly shedding them unless there's some really good reason to keep the agency. The big "bribe" to contributors for lousy splits is such a high volume of sales that the monthly total from our portfolios is high. When the volume of sales is low, as it is in Alamy's case, it makes it really hard to justify. Shutterstock and (before I left them) iStock make much more per month from my portfolio than Alamy does.

I guess I'll go see about opting out of third party deals and Novel Use (got one of those the other day and I thought they were going away/gone).

Your volume of sales on Alamy is dependent on your competition, style of content and keywording. It's true that for your style of content, volume of sales will likely be lower than what you would expect on high volume/subscription based micro sites but high volume is still possible on Alamy and of course our average price will be much higher. Ultimately Alamy will work better for some photographers rather than others, but it's part of the reason we remain committed to being non-exclusive and not tying our contributors into lengthy, restrictive contracts. Alamy won't be for *everyone* but most photographers should at least be using Alamy as an additional source of income, part of a wider network of distributors for their work.

Thinking specifically of the distribution scheme, although you will sometimes see lower value sales compared to that of your primary territories, it does account for around 20% of Alamy's total sales and we will often see 4 figure, sometimes 5 figure, individual sales come in via distribution. If you want your images to reach clients in countries Alamy doesn't currently target directly then we would always recommend opting in. Of course we understand though that this will not be for everyone, which is why you have the option to opt out should you wish.

Best wishes

James

James, in regards to the lower prices and 50 cent royalties on Novel Scheme images and what not, can you lower the payout threshold? 175 dollar on 50 cent sales is taking really long if not forever. I know you can blow 175 dollar out of the water with one sale, but I and many others dont have 80.000 photos online like some do. And with the heavily discounted pricing and giving away hi res images for a re-calculated royalty of 12%, I think its only fair to lower the payout threshold to match your new low pricing and reduced royalties.

We are always looking at the numbers and ensuring that our payout threshold is suitable for the majority of contributors. We recently reduced the threshold from $250 down to $175.

I can understand your point, but equally we hear from a number of contributors who have asked us to raise the threshold.

The alternative would be a system where contributors "cash out" and request to be paid when it suits them. We may be able to offer something like this in the future, but the resource and development time required to put something like this in place would best be diverted elsewhere for now. We've got a complete overhaul of the site starting very soon, with further developments for contributor facing features on the horizon for later this year.

Thanks,

James

Hi James,

Are there any plans in the upcoming overhaul to make uploading simpler?  For other sites we don't have to sit with each file deciding how to prioritise keywords into subsets after upload - they just populate a single form field with the keywords from our IPTC data.  Because this is consistent across other sites, it's easy to just upload everything to them all in one sitting. 

OTOH, if I want to upload to Alamy, I have to carve out time for a separate sitting and enter a different headspace to deal with the unique post-upload work required.  I would have sent a lot of images to Alamy if it weren't for the extra time required to jump that hurdle.

Could you not just advise uploaders to prioritise keywords the way you want them within the IPTC data and cut out the post-upload requirements?

(ETA:  This is assuming, of course, that the system hasn't been changed since I last uploaded!)

Hi there,

Although our multi-tier keyword system does have numerous benefits, we are well aware that the post upload workload imposed on our contributors can be an off-putting and at times a laborious task.

With this in mind, we are currently working on some fresh ideas that we hope to have in place at some point in the not too distant future. There are a few updates we need to make first, but it is very much in our thoughts.

In the meantime, if you have a high volume of images (eg, several hundred) you need to apply metadata to, if you email [email protected] there are a few things we can do to help, particularly in the way of offering an excel metadata template you can populate and email us which we will then apply to your images. This can often work out to be a quicker method than using the online Manage Images tools.

Best wishes

James Allsworth

Thanks James, I'm glad some ideas are in place to ease the upload burden on contributors.  I'm not sure about the excel thing though.  Like most of us, I embed keywords, title and description data when I save the image prior to uploading as the other agencies simply utilise that 'as is'.  It sounds as though I'd have to open every image I want to upload and copy paste the metadata across to a spreadsheet, is that right?  If so that would also be a very long-winded task for anyone with anything between several hundred and several thousand images.

I can't speak for your specific workflow, but many contributors keep a database of their metadata and send this out to agencies via excel templates. I'm no expert on database management, but I would assume that it would be relatively simple to export your data from your images into a spreadsheet format - if something doesn't exist that makes this simple, then there is a gap in the market!

Best wishes

James

Hi James,

While we're pinging ideas off of you, can you redesign the stats summary page? It is time consuming and cumbersome to figure out your monthly, quarterly and annual sales in a summary format.  For example:

March 2013:

$2150 Gross sales
$1000 Contributor commissions

Breakdown
$36 Novel Use Gross Sales   
$18 Novel use Contributor commission

$400 Distributor Gross Sales
$160 Distributor commission (40%)
$120 Alamy Commission (30%)
$120 Contibutor Commission

Alamy Sales
$1714 Gross
$857 Contributor commission

Even your CSV file requires you to manipulate it in Excel.  Would be REALLY nice if you had a nice, succinct financial summary by month, quarter and calendar year and also specified date range summaries.

Quote from: Mantis on March 26, 2013, 07:16

Would be REALLY nice if you had a nice, succinct financial summary by month, quarter and calendar year and also specified date range summaries.

Again, it's something we are aware is cumbersome and not very user friendly - even though it does technically work and is functional. Have you looked at the Net Revenue pages? You can set specific date ranges to suit you...

We've launched phase one of the new site today with some great features (http://www.alamy.com/whatsnew.asp) - the next phase is to improve some contributor facing pages. I can't say for sure when the financial summary pages will get a re-work, but I can assure you that it is on our road-map of improvements to be made. We are already working on the next version of "My Alamy" and a great looking contributor dashboard that will help you get to the important information much quicker - and it will look a darn sight nicer than it does currently.

All in all, many more improvements are on the way and it's always good for us to get this kind of feedback, so thank you.

Cheers

James

Thanks a bunch. Glad it's on your to do list.

Just logged in and noticed I got my first sale on April 24. Finally.

Selling is great, however, the sale was for $20.64. I was surprised at how low the price was so I checked out the licensing. Below are the specifics:

Country: United Kingdom
Usage: Editorial
Media: Newspaper - national
Print run: up to 2 million
Placement: Inside and online
Image Size: 1/4 page
Start: 01 March 2013
End: 02 March 2013
One use in a single editorial or advertorial article used within print and /or web versions, with re-use of the article in other titles or web versions within the same newspaper group. Digital use includes archive rights for the lifetime of the article.

This said, several things surprise me. The start run date is March 1 and yet the sale shows as April 24. Anyone know why this might be?

Second, I did a price check for the exact specifications shown above - $245. How does a rights managed image go from $245 to $20.64? Whatever the reason, I'm not too happy as this "subtle "pricing difference cost me $115. Apparently there is a UK newspaper scheme? It seems I might have to opt out of this because for a paper to use my image in a run of up to 2 million AND online for $20.64 is ridiculous. And that's leaving out the expletives.

Alamy seems to be taking liberties with the pricing or giving huge discounts with what is effectively my money...If I wanted to make $10 a photo I'd do nothing but sell on Microstock sites.

If anyone can help me understand this I'd appreciate it. Thanks.

Thanks Sue. I get 50% of the whopping $20.64 sale. I guess $10.32 is better than nothing but frankly, it's rubbish. When I saw I had a sale I was happy, of course, but then I saw how much it was for and compared to 50% of a $200-$300 sale, $20.64 is rather disheartening. Seriously, selling to a Microstock could make as much or more.

Seriously, selling to a Microstock could make as much or more.

Remember also that a bulk-buyer will be able to negotiate favourable terms on the micros too, see the recent SS thread ('Do I have to worry?').
Directly from SS on that thread:
"High "single image" royalties are often the result of a prenegotiated agreement with volume buyers such as large publishers and advertising agencies.  These volume buyers may require additional license or workflow features, such as the option for sensitive use, indemnification, multi-user accounts, prenegotiated pricing, and special billing and workflow features. "
http://www.microstockgroup.com/shutterstock-com/do-i-have-to-worry/msg313575/#msg313575

There are huge unadvertised discounts on really large credit bundles from iS which are negotiated directly.
Need Larger Credit Packs?
For larger or on-going projects, we also offer credit packs of 6,000, 10,000, 20,000 or 30,000 credits. For more information, please contact our Customer Sales team toll-free at 1 866 478 6251.
http://www.istockphoto.com/buy-stock-prepaid-credits.php
and presumably the other micros have similar arrangements.