shooting celebrities can pay very well, a friend of mine spotted the mayor of our city in an embarassing situation and location during his holiday and sold the images (awful iphone snaps) for 250 euro cash to a tra-shy gossip magazine, they paid him on the spot.

the article they made with his photos turned out ot be a fine example of the worst possible journalism, hahaha.
i wouldn't read such cr-ap even when taking a sh-it.

guess for serious celebrities the rates are around 1000s of euros and maybe millions of $ for sex scandals of hollywood actors, quens, and kings.

soon it will be more profitable to upload on RedBubble/Cafepress/Zazzle rather than IS.

I think that's mostly, but not entirely, true.  FAA does have keyword search, does attract buyers, and some contributors claim they're making sales based just on that, without any outside marketing at all.  My expectations were, and are, pretty low.

I'd say the big problem with FAA is that it looks dated, is clunky and inflexible, and is getting no investment or development.  They have a 'suggestion list' as long as your arm, containing many obvious and sensible things, and absolutely none of them ever happen.    FAA is rapidly falling behind and it's only a matter of time before new photo sharing and gallery sites make it obsolete.   

It's owned by one guy who's already made a lot of money from it.  I hope he sells, to someone who wants to invest in a massive update, and leverage the existing customer base and the value of the name.

yes it's a one-guy operation, he coded the whole CMS from scratch using several scripts lifted around and kept together with duct tape, he's a good guy technically speaking but he can't be expected to fix the whole cr-ap alone.

i mean at the time i left FAA there wasnt even a way to automate the import of keywords in the EXIF, now it's working it seems but so many issues were plagueing the site, it just wasn't designed to handle such a huge database.

besides, it was never meant for fine-art photos but for paintings, then later they changed idea and accepted photos just to be shocked at the number of images coming in from stockers.

all i can say these guys are lucky to be still be in business.
if no serious competitors popped up is probably it's a small market niche which is a pain in the as-s to be successfully monetized and i'm not surprised if we talk about paintings and prints, they've never been easy to sell and never will.

@Alamy : as i predicted your new forum is a dead man walking and you're forced to come into a microstock forum to advertise your blog.

categories are totally irrilevant when you've already dozens of keywords.

i can't believe so many agencies still use categories, what am i supposed to get clicking on category "travel" for instance ? a flood of 10 million random images ? what's the point, and will it ever lead to any sales ?

their system is broken and they know it.

there's just no way to rank 30-40 million images properly, google can do it with trillion of web pages but they rank based on more than 200 different factors and especially who's linking to that specific page etc .. .with photos there's no way to do that, all you can check is the number of views, zooms, and sales but for a lot of queries it will not be useful as you need a decent amount of data to bring decent results.

automatic ranking of images is the most stupidiest idea in the search industry in my opinion and alamy is also suffering from serious keyword spam.

There doesn't appear to be any evidence that it has been pirated except the statement that "news is out" that it has. Which kind of suggests that someone claims to have seen a blog where someone said they had heard from a friend ......

it's already on PirateBay and all the major torrents sites, it's a 1.4GB file and it seems to be working 100%.

can we see your blog?

i only blog in this forum

i'm afraid for Adobe that it's gotta be a very long "transition", there are still so many countries where internet is slow or expensive or unreliable or both, and it makes no sense at all to be "in the cloud" but Adobe has just no plans for these customers, this will just foster piracy even more.

what killed the industry is not digital or cheap cameras, it's the many autofocus, autoWB, auto-exposure, auto-everything and green modes !

if in green mode even my grandma can make a decent snapshot in 50% of the cases who needs to pay a photographer ?

and yeah, fitting a camera inside every cell phone was the last straw.

we can discuss for ages about how bad are these snapshots but for the average people they just look good enough, it's a disgrace.

this article by John Lund is pure BS, what he says was true maybe in 2009, nothing of what he recommends is working in 2013, now it's all about being linked by top-tier authority sites, even buying links is reported in SEO sites to be not working anymore.

by the way, to top it off he claims to be a webmaster but his blog is hosted on a free Blogger account and using the default template !

as for SEO there's an interesting discussion about "the state of SEO in 2013" :

http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4583408.htm



in short, google made sure it's becoming next to impossible to rank nowadays and there's constant fluctuation even for previously established authority sites.

this has certaily had a huge effect also on newspapers who planned to just "move to digital" and survive with subscriptions or advertising profiting from user-generated content, users spamming links on social networks, etc.

that's not working anymore it seems.

The problem is that if iStock will continue to accept anything, even the images of very bad quality, the good and the best images will finish to disappear in a kind of big melt of images without any value�

that's the price to pay to keep the archive "fresh".