MSG folks, thank you for your time. As a result, I've had some lovely email exchanges with potential contributors over the last 24 hours and I'll be looking at your folios asap.

For anyone reading this thread from the start, you need to decide whether I am here to exploit you, or whether I am here to help you for a fair reward. It's a simple as that. All my details are laid bare above, I'm all over the internet and I'm not hiding behind a screen of forum anonymity.

http://incamerastock.com
http://www.jonboyes.com

For further reading about me and my business please see the interview I did with John Lund earlier this year and draw your own conclusions:

http://blog.johnlund.com/2013/01/stock-photographer-jon-boyes-interview.html

Thanks again, over and out (and back to work!)

Jon

Quote from: RT on July 22, 2013, 22:57

Glad you're doing well, as I said earlier my point was to make sure potential contributors aren't being mislead by your claim to get them on Page 1 of the search results - I'm glad you've confirmed that isn't guaranteed.

BTW - You are targetting the terms I mentioned, whether you define it that way or not, because some of those words are in your 'essential' keywords for your images on Alamy. Again as I mentioned earlier be careful on basing too much of your statistics on what you see in 'All of Alamy', even Alamy admit that those results are from, and I quote - "Any signed up individual client who has spent over a certain threshold with Alamy." it's not as many as you may think.

Shame and surprised you've decided not to post here again as I'd be interested to hear your answer to bhr's last post, especially considering Alamy's Diversity Algorithm policy, if I was a potential contributor through you I'd be concerned that you'd shift all my best selling images into the pseudonym with all your own personal work in it, therefore boosting your search ranking and sales for the pseudonym containing your personal images, whilst the rest of my stuff gets 'edited' into another pseudo, it'd be good to have your confirmation that wouldn't happen.

If you do read this, as a suggestion why not give out details for some of the independent photographers who you currently distribute for, I couldn't find any details of other photographers on your site and your portfolio on Alamy doesn't list any names either (unusual approach IMO as most other distributors credit the photographer by name) so that others can gauge their success.

I'm really not prepared to go into the fine mechanics of how my business works with an anonymous forum account. Sorry!  You claim to have many years knowledge of Alamy but but in reality I have no way of telling if you really have. Anonymity offers zero credibility in my eyes. Some of your misunderstanding of how Alamy works makes me question your 'advice' which I neither courted nor need. 

People with whom I wish to work are given full details before they sign a contract. End of conversation (apart from the fact that you'll no doubt ensure you have the last word...).

Jon

Quote from: bhr on July 22, 2013, 21:38

Quote from: incamerastock on July 22, 2013, 18:10
We've done just that for our current contributors and they're making more sales and $$ with us than they did on their own. Plus it's non-exclusive so there's no risk of tying up images for years on end. They can continue with their own placements or place elsewhere etc

That makes sense because your selection is essentially a best-of. And a best-of selection is most likely to rank better. Even more so if you move stuff which gets zooms or sales to a best-of best-of pseudonym. I guess that one potential downside for a contributor would be that their own pseudonyms will likely end up containing only their non selected images - so their own pseudonyms will not benefit from the improved ranking which their best images garner.

This is assuming that people are not posting the same images to Alamy both via yourselves and via their own accounts.

But - great that people are trying different approaches and seeing what works best for them.

Yes, as you rightly state we are non-exclusive so we can take stuff that's elsewhere including stuff that's on Alamy already. Some of our contributors choose to move the images we select to us, some upload a copy to us. It matters not to Alamy. Many images on Alamy that come via agencies are duplicated, especially non-exclusive ones.  If the images perform with our keywording and rank you win, if it doesn't perform you haven't lost any more time than the upload to our FTP took.

Obviously, if you have a good rank already and you're making a good sales ratio you'd be unwise to jeopardise that by moving images to us and we've turned down applicants whose rank is actually pretty good. I'm looking for people with great images that are buried because they don't have the time to keyword properly or know how to  work up an Alamy rank. We can help those people if they have the right images.

We use a range of pseudonyms to place the collection images in. That goes for my own personal images too. Our only aim is to obtain the best possible placement for each image and therefore maximise the chance of a sale.

Jon

Quote from: RT on July 22, 2013, 20:27

Quote from: incamerastock on July 22, 2013, 18:10

Quote from: RT on July 22, 2013, 16:40

Re 1) I'd be interested what you mean by 'image placement' - as Alamy don't have any image placement schemes. Also the keyword stats you refer to are, I'm guessing, just based on the 'Your images' or 'All of Alamy' information that's freely available to any contributor. (edited to add - which isn't of much use anyway)

Re 2) That's a bold claim, are you guaranteeing a Page 1 rank for any work people upload via you.*

I'm just not sure what it is that you can offer of tangible value to a new contributor in return for your cut of their commission, what unique services can you offer to persuade a potential contributor to use you instead of one of the big established distributors or, better IMO, just upload there themselves.

*edit - Just had a quick look at your portfolio, I picked two images that are in your portfolio, the sort of common images that your target audience will be uploading via you, using keywords that you feature in the description of your images ('young blond woman' and 'black puppy') your images did not feature on Page 1 of the search results - Sorry!

Hi RT,

Taking your points in order,

1) By "image placement" I mean placing images in our pseudonym structure and moving them where necessary based on stats feedback. You're right there's no "image placement scheme" in effect at Alamy outside of Rank and the Diversity Algorithm which affects everyone equally based on their performance.

2) At the moment (and since about 2008 when I got to the heady heights of page 1 on a couple of my pseudonyms) you'd get a Page 1 placement for the 'targetted search term' if we keyword it properly. If we were to lose that Rank you wouldn't. *But* unless Alamy substantially change Rank past performance has shown we can get several images to page 1 for our targetted terms. There are no 'guarantees' of anything. That would be irresponsible. No agency will guarantee sales. We don't guarantee sales or search placement because Alamy could change that algorithm at a whim. But they haven't thus far. It's in our interest to do *our* half of this job correctly because if you don't sell, we don't earn either.

3) What can we offer? Not sure I can state it any clearer than I did earlier in the thread. If you're currently mid-pack, not getting viewed or zoomed for whatever reason and therefore not making sales, we can get you to the front, properly keyworded and having a far greater chance of making sales. We've done just that for our current contributors and they're making more sales and $$ with us than they did on their own. Plus it's non-exclusive so there's no risk of tying up images for years on end. They can continue with their own placements or place elsewhere etc etc.

Should be remembered that Alamy use non standard IPTC. Other agencies have keywording which is not really optimised for Alamy. They sell via weight of numbers. We outrank a fair few of them already. See examples below.

4) You just gave examples of a couple of searches, let me give you an example of our targetted keywording:

"Black Puppy": You're right we're not Page 1 for that keyword term because it's not the keyword term used by customers. However if you try "Puppy" you'll see that (on a Relevant search) we are Page 1 Position 1.

According to Alamy stats "Black Puppy" was searched for ZERO times in the last 365 days whereas "Puppy" was searched for 41 times. So we target the most common search buyers make. And to rank for a *single* keyword is much harder than for two together. Most searches are single keyword. Just look at Alamy's own AoA stats.

Same with "Young Blond Woman".  Only 1 search in the last 365 days for that combo so we don't target that and are not Page 1. However "Blonde woman" (note spelling) and simply "woman" are 9 & 108 searches a year respectively. For these we Rank Page 1 Position 1, 3 & 5 for "blonde woman" plus Page 1 Position 4 for "woman" (out of 3.5m returned results) on "Relevant" and Page 1 Position 2, 7 & 20 (plus others) on "Creative"... I'd say that was pretty good

Jon

Maybe I should have been a bit more transparent, I've been on Alamy as long as you, and by the numbers you gave I actually sell more from a smaller portfolio - I was making those points in general for those that are reading this thread.

As I said earlier the search statistics you're using are not that useful and as a seasoned contributor you should know that, you're quoting search terms based on the 'All of Alamy' which is based upon a very small number of account holders search information, the information is worthless, for instance do a few searches for 'London' and 'Olympics' dating from 1st July 2012 - the result 22, really,  you believe Britains biggest agency only had 22 searches in over a year for the biggest event this country has ever hosted!

At least I'm glad to see that you're not guaranteeing people a placement on Page 1, but it does beg the question what do you mean by this "More importantly, you get a Page 1 Rank via us" - 'young blond woman' is a targeted search term, and you don't appear on page 1 (by the way I used that spelling because it's how you have it spelled in your description).

I'm not denying that you've got a good search rank, and I'm sure if people uploaded their images via yourself they'd initially get a better placement in search results, but it's not the big issue you're making it out to be, and you don't have any 'insider' information that the majority of microstockers don't already know - and that is keyword accurately.

I wish you luck, but my advice to you would be to try and sign up as an agency for the likes of Getty/Corbis/Masterfile on a multiple distributor scheme (like Tetra or Blend) because then you might have something to offer that people can't do themselves.

Hi RT,

Congratulations on your sales. You're obviously an old hand like me so you'll appreciate just how hard it is to move up the ranks at Alamy these days with 35m images in the mix. If a new entrant can get themselves where it took us three years to get (in the old days circa 04-08) then they deserve to keep 50% of a sale & get a medal....

We'll have to disagree about the usefulness of the AoA stats and Rank. AoA shows us a snapshot (I didn't say "all") of the activity from selected clients. Interpreting this works for us. Also, the way we target searches unsing keywords is giving us sales growth of 30-40%. I'm quite happy with that and the way my business is developing. My contributors are making more $$ via us than from their own accounts. To the business savvy, that's what matters. Our Rank is great and stable and our own daily stats shows that a vast majority of searches hit 240/360 at most in views. If you're not up the front you're not being seen on the single/double keyword searches of that type.

You're obviously not at all interested (unlike a number of people who've approached us with good folios today) so I'll bid you good evening. If I can't impress you with a Page 1 Pos 1 placement out of 3.5 million for a single keyword search term like "Woman" it's game over for me, you win I'm not going to try and convince you and I don't have time for a forum "mine's bigger than yours" contest

BTW, You're still misunderstanding "targeted search term" as *we* define it. None of our *keywording* targets the phrase "young blond woman". Because customers do not use it as frequently as other searches. We target frequently used customer searches and for those phrases we rank page 1 and "above the fold" as demonstrated earlier today.

I really can't put it simpler than that.

For interested parties: Approaches via the website links in the original post please. Happy to go into detail or answer Qs 1:1.  I won't be posting here again, all you need to know is above.


Cheers all,


Jon

Quote from: luissantos84 on July 22, 2013, 18:32
Jon maybe I am missing something but how can we be sure of the sales we actually had, do you show us print screens?

are you paying also after 90 days?

Hi,

You'll get a monthly sales statement (like most smaller agencies provide).

Payment terms and the details are further down the line than I want to go into here on a forum. First job is for interested parties to contact me via the website and provide a link to their folio so I can see if I want to work with you.. 

Jon

Quote from: bhr on July 22, 2013, 17:06

Quote from: incamerastock on July 22, 2013, 13:21
Last month we made 130 sales from 14k images.

So roughly 1 sale per 100 images.

So far this month I made 2 sales on roughly 400 images. Given that you would have taken half of that, it works out roughly the same from my point of view doesn't it ? And suppose you had chosen to reject the very images which sold ? My average has declined slightly since I uploaded another 100 or so over the past maybe 6 weeks.

If you are picking the cream of any portfolio as you say then that goes a long way to explaining how you are beating the average. Espeecially as lots of people seem to be uploading a lot of similars to Alamy and sometimes stuff which seems to have no usefully descriptive content or endless pictures of apparently not much.

Is the keywording thing really such a secret sauce ? If you think through how the search works lots of it seems obvious.

Not criticising your approach which will probably suit many contributors. Also I am totally aware that I have far too few images to start drawing real statistical conclusions

Hi Bhr

If you're already doing well on Alamy. Congrats! We can't help you. We can't make people buy your images, we can just keyword them to give them max exposure with our Rank placements and take that laborious image management side (for you should continually tweak behind the scenes) away.

To get Rank you must edit well. So we edit. It keeps our Rank high and our sales good. Can you imagine an unedited Getty? Don't Micro sites edit for content? I'm an agency, time is money, of course I edit!!

Keywording is not a secret sauce if you understand the relationship between keywording and the stats and keyword accordingly. See examples in prior post to RT. We use *publicly available info* from the Alamy stats. You can keyword to target search phrases and that's what we do.  It's all about max RoI.

Jon

Quote from: RT on July 22, 2013, 16:40

Re 1) I'd be interested what you mean by 'image placement' - as Alamy don't have any image placement schemes. Also the keyword stats you refer to are, I'm guessing, just based on the 'Your images' or 'All of Alamy' information that's freely available to any contributor. (edited to add - which isn't of much use anyway)

Re 2) That's a bold claim, are you guaranteeing a Page 1 rank for any work people upload via you.*

I'm just not sure what it is that you can offer of tangible value to a new contributor in return for your cut of their commission, what unique services can you offer to persuade a potential contributor to use you instead of one of the big established distributors or, better IMO, just upload there themselves.

*edit - Just had a quick look at your portfolio, I picked two images that are in your portfolio, the sort of common images that your target audience will be uploading via you, using keywords that you feature in the description of your images ('young blond woman' and 'black puppy') your images did not feature on Page 1 of the search results - Sorry!

Hi RT,

Taking your points in order,

1) By "image placement" I mean placing images in our pseudonym structure and moving them where necessary based on stats feedback. You're right there's no "image placement scheme" in effect at Alamy outside of Rank and the Diversity Algorithm which affects everyone equally based on their performance.

2) At the moment (and since about 2008 when I got to the heady heights of page 1 on a couple of my pseudonyms) you'd get a Page 1 placement for the 'targetted search term' if we keyword it properly. If we were to lose that Rank you wouldn't. *But* unless Alamy substantially change Rank past performance has shown we can get several images to page 1 for our targetted terms. There are no 'guarantees' of anything. That would be irresponsible. No agency will guarantee sales. We don't guarantee sales or search placement because Alamy could change that algorithm at a whim. But they haven't thus far. It's in our interest to do *our* half of this job correctly because if you don't sell, we don't earn either.

3) What can we offer? Not sure I can state it any clearer than I did earlier in the thread. If you're currently mid-pack, not getting viewed or zoomed for whatever reason and therefore not making sales, we can get you to the front, properly keyworded and having a far greater chance of making sales. We've done just that for our current contributors and they're making more sales and $$ with us than they did on their own. Plus it's non-exclusive so there's no risk of tying up images for years on end. They can continue with their own placements or place elsewhere etc etc.

Should be remembered that Alamy use non standard IPTC. Other agencies have keywording which is not really optimised for Alamy. They sell via weight of numbers. We outrank a fair few of them already. See examples below.

4) You just gave examples of a couple of searches, let me give you an example of our targetted keywording:

"Black Puppy": You're right we're not Page 1 for that keyword term because it's not the keyword term used by customers. However if you try "Puppy" you'll see that (on a Relevant search) we are Page 1 Position 1.

According to Alamy stats "Black Puppy" was searched for ZERO times in the last 365 days whereas "Puppy" was searched for 41 times. So we target the most common search buyers make. And to rank for a *single* keyword is much harder than for two together. Most searches are single keyword. Just look at Alamy's own AoA stats.

Same with "Young Blond Woman".  Only 1 search in the last 365 days for that combo so we don't target that and are not Page 1. However "Blonde woman" (note spelling) and simply "woman" are 9 & 108 searches a year respectively. For these we Rank Page 1 Position 1, 3 & 5 for "blonde woman" plus Page 1 Position 4 for "woman" (out of 3.5m returned results) on "Relevant" and Page 1 Position 2, 7 & 20 (plus others) on "Creative"... I'd say that was pretty good

Jon

Quote from: Ron on July 22, 2013, 13:40
50/50 of 30 is 15% --- even for all the hard work you do, no way.

Hi Ron,

I've seen your posts over at the Alamy forum *waves*...

Just for the benefit of facts, what you've quoted there is the Alamy distribution commission rate i.e. a sale made on Alamy via an Alamy distributor for which you receive 30% (used to be 40%).

Distributor sales make up only 9% of our sales so 91% of our sales are at 50% (direct sales). For which our contributors get 25% (at the 50/50 split).

Obviously, it's for each individual to decide whether joining an agency/portal is a good business decision or not. I've weighed this up many times over the years. In deciding whether to work with us you'd have to decide whether 25% of a gross sale amount (which can be large and it can be small, we get both!!) is worth more than 50% of a sale that may not be made because of poor Rank, poor keywording or both.

Cheers

Jon

Quote from: a1bercik on July 22, 2013, 12:53
I don't get it, to be honest. I would need an explanation to one question: why You, and not directly Alamy?

Hi a1bercik,

In terms of why go via us and not directly to Alamy:

1) We do all the non-standard keywording, uploading, attribution, image placement, ongoing maintenance to keywords based on the stats we get re searches etc.
2) More importantly, you get a Page 1 Rank via us, if you go directly as a new contrib to Alamy you start mid-pack (i.e. you'll return down in the middle of hundreds of pages) so on the really popular searches you'll never get seen (a vast majority of searches don't go past a few pages tops). Rank (search position) is the absolute key to sales on Alamy.

It's that simple!

Last month we made 130 sales from 14k images. We regularly return over 100 sales a month.

Cheers

Jon

Quote from: ShadySue on July 22, 2013, 12:56

Quote from: a1bercik on July 22, 2013, 12:53
Also, can't find the commissions structure (I understand that your company is going to make a profit on my shots?).

Interesting little factlet to omit, I thought.

Hi a1bercik & Sue,

It's 50/50.

I didn't really want to post our entire business plan as my first post...   We're happy to discuss the contract and how it all works in detail with those people who want to work with us and have saleable images.

Jon

Hi all,

I run a small non-exclusive photo agency called incamerastock and we're looking for a small number of new contributors to work with.

We place our images mainly on Alamy where we have an excellent AlamyRank – i.e. our contributors' images are returned in keyword searches starting at the top of Page 1. This means we make a large number of sales each month for the number of images in our collection.

Currently, Alamy customers are mainly newspapers, magazines (editorial) and textbook publishers but they are making good progress in securing creative (ad, marketing and design agency) clients. At the moment our collection is mainly RM, but because of Alamy's push for creative clients and their increasing number of deals with publishers where the licence designation is essentially irrelevant, we are looking to increase the quantity and quality of our RF images.

I started off as a solo Alamy contributor in 2004. I've never placed images on microstock because by the time I had my foot in the macro door and started making regular sales I could see I didn't have the time needed to build a microstock folio as well, and I shoot & produce stock full-time.  I started incamerastock in 2011 to help out a couple of friends with good stock folios but a poor Alamy Rank (because they didn't understand how it worked) and we've gone from there. We've been through all the Alamy changes and have remained constantly at the top of the search engine due to well-processed, high-quality, saleable images tailored for Alamy's target audience and our sales figures continue to grow: http://incamerastock.com/2013/07/10/theres-still-money-in-stock-photography/

To ensure we retain our search position and also to make sure you have the type of work which appeals to their customer base, we will edit your images. We also do all the keywording from scratch, because Alamy has a non-standard keywording approach and getting it right is a vital part of making sales there. So all you need to do is provide us with the images and a caption – we do everything else.   

We know how frustrating it is to spend time and effort uploading images to agencies that don't perform – that's why we don't take on everyone who wants to join incamerastock. We'll be honest with you about whether we think your images would sell on Alamy. Check out this page to see if you have the kind of work we're looking for: http://incamerastock.com/photographers/

If you are already on Alamy but are buried in the pack, or want to try Alamy for the first time and are not sure how to go about it, check out: http://incamerastock.com/ and if you want to know more about how we can help you, contact us via the email contact form on the website.

Jon