Has anyone got any experience of how Alamy editorial sales compare to iStock editorial sales, for both volume and royalties?

iStock has stopped inspecting my editorial images for a month now and I can't get anyone to fix it so I'm thinking of sending my editorial images to Alamy as RM instead.

This is the sort of content I produce:

http://www.gettyimages.co.uk/search/photographer?collections=sku&photographer=fotovoyager&excludenudity=true&sort=best

as for volume iStock still wins, but it's almost exclusively subscription sales for 0.28. I stopped submitting there a couple of months ago. At Alamy not so many sales but much higher revenue ranging between 15-150$/sale

That's strange my recent editorials have been inspected in less than a day.  I'd say you should put the ones you don't expect to sell often on Alamy.

Quote from: tickstock on December 10, 2016, 12:39

That's strange my recent editorials have been inspected in less than a day.  I'd say you should put the ones you don't expect to sell often on Alamy.

Almost a month for my last. Are you IS exclusive?

Yep, so is fotovoyager.  I do also have some RM on Alamy.

My sales on Alamy are not near 70 times higher than my iStock sales even counting subs and pp.

I reckon 1 in 10 of my sales on iStock are editorial, with an average royalty of $8ish.

Really? Even averaging over subs sales?
My editorial sales on iS are around 45%, but with so few credit sales nowadays, my average is much, much lower than that.

I had high hopes for editorial images on Getty but they only transferred 400 of my 2000 editorial images with no feed back about what the problem is or when or if it'll be resolved.

Apparently some have had half or 'most' of their files ported over.
I've had <3% ported over.

It's a mixed blessing, though. Nowadays some of my purple Getty sales net me less than a sub sale, even less than 20c, which is unacceptable to me.

Also, for some ridiculous reason they've declined to explain, iS editorial aren't going into Getty editorial, but into Getty 'creative' with a note that they can only be used editorially. So someone needing an editorial photo can't use an iS editorial file, and people may click on what looks like a 'creative' (stupid word for commercially-usable) file then find it isn't available. How to piss off possible buyers in one step, and is almost guaranteed that some editorial files will be used commercially (which already happens with iS editorial files, even though they're better indicated).

I like the look of the Alamy site, and I definitely like the idea of 50% royalties, even if, as I suspect, a lot sales come through partners and you end up with 30%.
...
I'll give iStock till Xmas to sort my problem out, then I'll put the hundreds of editorial images from my last trip to Kathmandu and the Himalayas on Alamy and see how they go there over the next six months.

I wouldn't bank on iS sorting any problems out, whether porting editorials (they also declined to explain why it was happening patchily between contributors and why it's taking time anyway) or sorting the false keywords their system is currently inserting into files without us or CR being able to do anything about it, which is really messing about searches. I suspect it's because iS's CV is being changed to be more in line with Getty's, which has long been inaccurate in many areas. Yet another regression.

Also, six months isn't long enough on Alamy. Some of their buyers don't even report sales during that time. I was 8 months/>800 images before I had my first reported sale, though obviously some sales, e.g. from one-off buyers, are reported and paid for immediately. You can opt out of distributor and UK Newspaper Scheme sales. Some distributor sales are very low value (eg from Italy), but some are high value, even though we only get 30%.

It's a shame because iStock has improved significantly for me over the past few months. I was hoping we'd turned a corner there, but if they won't sort my problems out I'll have to come up with alternatives.

Wow, congrats on your uptick on iStock. Is it commensurate with your current effort? From what I'm reading in various open and closed sources, the few people who are maintaining sales or $$ on iS are saying it still isn't worth their outlay/time/effort with new files.

Quote from: fotoVoyager on December 11, 2016, 05:05

I reckon 1 in 10 of my sales on iStock are editorial, with an average royalty of $8ish.

Really? Even averaging over subs sales?
My editorial sales on iS are around 45%, but with so few credit sales nowadays, my average is much, much lower than that.

That's just iStock credit sales. I have no way of easily measuring the percentage of sub sales.

My analysis scripts show that half my iStock credit downloads are S+ and are less than 2 years old, both of which I've worked hard to supply, so that may account for my improvement in sales.

Well I'm not exclusive but I can confirm my editorials are always reviewed in under a day (often minutes). Uploaded some last night and they were approved when I got up this morning. Sounds like there may be some other issue here if yours are waiting a month. Non editorial, on the other hand, are currently taking several weeks before review.