MicrostockGroup
Microstock Photography Forum - General => Newbie Discussion => Topic started by: 2checkingout on August 04, 2019, 04:42
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Just woken up this and got super excited to find a couple of photos sold on Alamy for $300, then I realised that Alamy shows the full purchase price before they remove 60%, doh... Well at least it's still 40%...but then I read the part that says buyers can take between 45 - 90 days to pay WHAT!!!!
In your experience how many customers don't pay and cancel the purchase on Alamy?
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Just woken up this and got super excited to find a couple of photos sold on Alamy for $300, then I realised that Alamy shows the full purchase price before they remove 60%, doh... Well at least it's still 40%...but then I read the part that says buyers can take between 45 - 90 days to pay WHAT!!!!
In your experience how many customers don't pay and cancel the purchase on Alamy?
Sometimes there are refunds, but usually (not always) these are rebought for the same, higher or lower amounts.
Occasionally people don't pay and aren't successfully chased up.
BTW, sometimes it takes a lot longer than 90 days (especially with sales via distributors), but after three full months (i.e. the beginning of the following calender month), if you haven't seen a payment, make your first contact with Alamy to push it along.
Still, these are good value sales for Alamy nowadays, so well done! The probability is that you will get your money down the line.
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Many thanks ShadySue, these are my first sales on Alamy so super, better than the .25c per sale on SS
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In my humble experience the big sales usually clear in about a month, it's the small ones from distributors that got hanging even for 6 months.
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The way I think about the horrendous gap between the purchaser downloading the image and me getting paid is that it is covered by Alamy's higher prices. It's a very common business practice to charge less for payment up front (car rental or hotel) versus when you check in/pick up versus when the invoice arrives later.
The smaller sales with long-delayed payment are an annoyance, but I can live with that. I don't do distributor sales because I think it's a racket in the age of internet agencies and the distributor makes more than I do for essentially nothing. Fortunately, Alamy lets you opt out.
As an example, I got paid August 1st for a sale from 30 May that just cleared at the end of July. The longest was over a year (including several emails with Alamy support to remind them to chase the customer up).
I have had a few refunds, but not lots.
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Many thanks Jo Ann
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I still have a sale from March 2018 that hasn't cleared ~ a crap hole distributor sale.
My advice drop distributor sales on Alamy they are really akin to micro stock values and you wait months for them to clear.
Also you can wait up to 3 to 4 months for magazine and newspaper usage to clear.
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My advice drop distributor sales on Alamy they are really akin to micro stock values and you wait months for them to clear.
Some are, but some distributor are relatively high value, even though you only get 30%.
Especially if someone already has the same images in micro, they might as well stay 'in' distributor sales.
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I feel a bit trapped at Alamy. I'm waiting for payments to clear, so i keep uploading. trapped in a roundabout with no exit.
I hate their disambiguation process.
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I feel a bit trapped at Alamy. I'm waiting for payments to clear, so i keep uploading. trapped in a roundabout with no exit.
I hate their disambiguation process.
What disambiguation?
Also AFAIK you'd get your payments when they clear, even if you have closed your account. You could always check with their CS to be sure.
In any case, don't we have to give six months' notice to close?
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I feel a bit trapped at Alamy. I'm waiting for payments to clear, so i keep uploading. trapped in a roundabout with no exit.
I hate their disambiguation process.
What disambiguation?
that whole "poor discoverability" thing. trying to get the line turn green is pretty challenging, you have to put in so many keywords, or a super long caption, plus other things like location, category, etc. It's tedious and i'm sure leads to heaps of kw spamming by others. I generally don't bother, or I only bother with one out of a set.
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I feel a bit trapped at Alamy. I'm waiting for payments to clear, so i keep uploading. trapped in a roundabout with no exit.
I hate their disambiguation process.
What disambiguation?
that whole "poor discoverability" thing. trying to get the line turn green is pretty challenging, you have to put in so many keywords, or a super long caption, plus other things like location, category, etc. It's tedious and i'm sure leads to heaps of kw spamming by others. I generally don't bother, or I only bother with one out of a set.
Ah, nothing to do with disambiguation.
The 'discoverability' thing is a very poorly thought-out (to put it politely) notion of Alamy (they have them, just like all the rest) which as you suggest leads to spam.
Even if you don't spam, for most images tryng to get to 42 keywords would lead to keywording small features of an image which are pretty irrelevant, meaning your views will increase but not your zooms/sales, which allegedly might knock back your Alamy Rank. Also remember that on Alamy any word from the caption can be merged with any keyword, even one word from a keyword phrase, also giving irrelevant views and hitting your click through rate. I normally get at least one of these search malgorithms daily. Eg today I have a hit for Turkish Tent, which is a Turkish musician performing in a tent. (But in particular, if you have an image of Joe Bloggs and Jane Doe, your image will show up on searches for Joe Doe, Jane Bloggs, Joe Jane, etc. Sometimes these mismatches show higher in the search than images of the real Joe Doe / whatever, but it's not so bad at the moment.
The more keywords you have, the most likely these malgorithms are to happen.
FWIW, I have fewer than 5% of my file with 'good discoverability' and these are all files with either a lot of location specific keywords or a lot of subject specific keywords, e.g. if it's a species which has recently had its name or classification changed, I'll put in the old and new terms, as many people don't keep absolutely up to date with these changes, and some regard them as 'dubious'.
In case you're not convinced, at the time when they introduced the current system, Alamy put up a video showing how the system worked, and they only used 16 (sixteen) keywords:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DeGewd73uw (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DeGewd73uw)
FWIW, ATM and for over a year past, words in captions have ranked highter than in keywords, so make sure all your important keywords are in the caption.
The issues arising from the stupid discoverability thing have been discussed here a few times, and over on the Alamy forum many times. Alamy have never jumped in to explain why it's a good idea - but nor have they removed the feature).
And finally, if it's not a Live News or archival/reportage image, you can't have a 'super long caption': these are limited to 150 characters and have nothing to do with discoverability.
Correction: as mentioned above, your caption has everything to do with real discoverability, but nothing to do with Alamy's stupid 'discoverability' feature.
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Ah, nothing to do with disambiguation.
The 'discoverability' thing is a very poorly thought-out (to put it politely) notion of Alamy (they have them, just like all the rest) which as you suggest leads to spam.
Even if you don't spam, for most images tryng to get to 42 keywords would lead to keywording small features of an image which are pretty irrelevant, meaning your views will increase but not your zooms/sales, which allegedly might knock back your Alamy Rank. Also remember that on Alamy any word from the caption can be merged with any keyword, even one word from a keyword phrase, also giving irrelevant views and hitting your click through rate. I normally get at least one of these search malgorithms daily. Eg today I have a hit for Turkish Tent, which is a Turkish musician performing in a tent. (But in particular, if you have an image of Joe Bloggs and Jane Doe, your image will show up on searches for Joe Doe, Jane Bloggs, Joe Jane, etc. Sometimes these mismatches show higher in the search than images of the real Joe Doe / whatever, but it's not so bad at the moment.
The more keywords you have, the most likely these malgorithms are to happen.
FWIW, I have fewer than 5% of my file with 'good discoverability' and these are all files with either a lot of location specific keywords or a lot of subject specific keywords, e.g. if it's a species which has recently had its name or classification changed, I'll put in the old and new terms, as many people don't keep absolutely up to date with these changes, and some regard them as 'dubious'.
In case you're not convinced, at the time when they introduced the current system, Alamy put up a video showing how the system worked, and they only used 16 (sixteen) keywords:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DeGewd73uw (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DeGewd73uw)
FWIW, ATM and for over a year past, words in captions have ranked highter than in keywords, so make sure all your important keywords are in the caption.
The issues arising from the stupid discoverability thing have been discussed here a few times, and over on the Alamy forum many times. Alamy have never jumped in to explain why it's a good idea - but nor have they removed the feature).
And finally, if it's not a Live News or archival/reportage image, you can't have a 'super long caption': these are limited to 150 characters and have nothing to do with discoverability.
Correction: as mentioned above, your caption has everything to do with real discoverability, but nothing to do with Alamy's stupid 'discoverability' feature.
sorry, alamy call it "annotate". I couldn't think of what other word to use. I wasn't sure what the secret sauce was to get the green "good visibility" status, as I have images with 40 keywords that are green, but others needed 42 or more. If you add some of the Optional options you get a tiny boost in that orange line, however I don't see having a longer description helping as you pointed out. I will in the future try to add more kw to my description. The YT tutorial doesn't address this. I'll search here and see if anyone has more clues.
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Clue/Opinion and I'm not alone. That discoverability is a computer saying, your image is more discoverable, not a fact or promise. Your images may be less discoverable after forcing too many keywords, and a poorer match if you are writing longer titles and descriptions just to have a different color show and suggest you are going to be "more discoverable" because a dot or highlight changed colors.
Don't worry, just do what's right for a proper description and best keywords.
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Clue/Opinion and I'm not alone. That discoverability is a computer saying, your image is more discoverable, not a fact or promise. Your images may be less discoverable after forcing too many keywords, and a poorer match if you are writing longer titles and descriptions just to have a different color show and suggest you are going to be "more discoverable" because a dot or highlight changed colors.
Don't worry, just do what's right for a proper description and best keywords.
good advice, and I checked on my sales and they were all "poor discoverability" anyway. I've finally put in some effort to work out which line in Bridge metadata gets the title imported (it's the Description in case you use Bridge too) so now when they get accepted they are already "on sale" so i dont have to bother going in and doing anything.
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Funny....I closed My account a Loooooog time ago and deleted all Images. Just got a payment yesterday??.