Not mentioning any names here  but this is how I feel every agency CEO should act in reply to their suppliers concerns:
http://www.alamy.com/Blog/contributor/archive/2010/10/18/4845.aspx

Yup. Good to read.
We all mess up - it's what we do about it which matters.

Thumbs up for James

Getty has been doing this for a while.  They say it should help sales, because more artists can fit on one page, instead of results all from one contributor.  Which would be even worse on Alamy, because they tend to upload their entire shoot of similars.

Not mentioning any names here  but this is how I feel every agency CEO should act in reply to their suppliers concerns:

http://www.alamy.com/Blog/contributor/archive/2010/10/18/4845.aspx

Exactly. I too had several email exchanges with them regarding this problem and I was extremely surprised to see how fast they admitted it's not a good change. This IS professionalism.

I like the way it works, in which images from the same contributor appear mixed in the results page, so you get more variety. This recent change however, if it's what I saw yesterday, only showed one result by each contributor, and you have to click on "more" to see the rest of them. Maybe not too bad when a search returns tons of images and so the buyer may skip the similars faster, but in the case I saw there were few results, so it looked odd not to visualize all of them at the same time.

I think the idea they had was good and if it is implemented properly it should help buyers and that will keep contributors happy.

True. The other problem was little control over what showed as the first image of a series. I could have an event with 72 photos and the first one might be Winners Circle, two guys with a trophy, while the other 71 were shots of cars or drivers. They did say that what was first before would be the top of the stack, and I figured out how to control that, but maybe I won't need to worry for another year, while they work out the kinks in the system.

I don't know how showing the buyers less and making them click through for more, makes viewing easier, unless it was supposed to direct them to a bunch of similar images to the first one.

Admitting a mistake, how refreshing!

If it only went into effect October 7th then it wouldn't explain my poor sales in September.  Wonder if they did a reranking in Aug. or Sept.?

I think the whole idea of Alamy Rank is overblown. I know that some of my series are on page one, some in the first two rows, some searches I'm the first photo, and none of those have ever sold. Also the whole mysterious ranking plus diversity, means that many more people get a good exposure before someone with a bazillion similars or a series of the same model, moving an inch won't fill the page with that junk.

One that did sell, is RM and first on the page, but that's after the re-rank. It used to be further down the page. We can only guess, but I suspect that sales have more to do with rank than that whole complex, views, zooms, purchases = CTR formula.

According to the information I found the last re-rank was September 7th with the usual gnashing of teeth and complaints of positions dropped, less views Etc. So maybe it matters but not for someone with mostly one subject. As people have pointed out to me more than once, it';s the big picture, years vs years or long term trends, not one month vs last month. I find no pattern to sales on Alamy for myself. When I least expect it, someone buys something. Now I'm in the off season so I'd expect less sales. Here's hoping that I'll find another one of those surprise sales.

If it only went into effect October 7th then it wouldn't explain my poor sales in September.  Wonder if they did a reranking in Aug. or Sept.? 

You need to count back at Alamy, a lot of buyers have a 45day honour period, so in actual fact your poor sales in September are really poor sales from the July/August summer holidays period.

Quote from: sharpshot link=topic=11542.msg167146#msg167146 date=

I think the idea they had was good and if it is implemented properly it should help buyers and that will keep contributors happy.

+1

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