| David Lyons |
| Newbie |
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| UK |
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| None Specified |
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| Saturday, April 19, 2008 |
| Saturday, November 21, 2009 6:21:48 PM |
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kevin wrote:"is stock financially viable and worth the effort long term?"
If you're an experienced photographer or already well established in the stock business then possibly yes but you have to keep steadily plugging away at it and it will probably continue to get harder to stay afloat. If you're a newbie in photography or just starting out in the stock business then a resounding NO!
I think you are 100% correct in everything you say there Kevin.
The chances of most individual contributors to this or any other non edited agency / portal ever even breaking even on their money and time investment is zero.
Too many people think this is a get rich quick with little effort or talent game. It most definitely is not. Because of the vast quantities of pictures now available and the related lowering in usage fees, even those experienced and talented photographers with large back catalogues of already paid for pictures find it challenging to currently make stock financially viable. Most people here would be well advised to hang up there cameras and go fishing or at least to keep their photography for pleasure and stop being pre-occupied with trying to make money from it. For the vast majority it is just not going to happen. Not now. Not in 5 years. Not in 15 years. (No I don't have a crystal ball but I can add two and two and I see it comes to much less than is needed to cover the real outgoings in time and money for most). I speak as a full time professional for thirty years and over twenty contributing to stock. My guess would be that less than 8% of individual contributors to Alamy break even if they really factor in their time and costs. Today, the chances of anyone breaking into that 8% without experience, talent, a considerable back catalogue of commercially viable images and / or a commercial specialist niche is becoming vanishingly smaller every month that passes. You will easily recognise those who do because their work will necessarily be outstanding. Because there is now much more competition, the days of making an easy sale from average pictures are fast disappearing. Many here participate because they enjoy this as a hobby. That's fine. Most who respond on this forum are hobbyists. That's fine. Is stock financially viable? Only if you stop treating it like a hobby.
Brian, yes it is definitely possible to make at least the figures you aim at if you tailor what you shoot / submit to stock market needs and quality. But you probably need to dedicate more time to it than you suggest. The viable balance between this and your other professional photography is something only you can figure out. Different mind sets / approaches are needed for different kinds of work. Increasingly, it's really not just about quantity. Good luck with it.
David Lyons.
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Some information if it helps.
I have always been opted out of the UK national newspapers subscription because as a professional it is important to me that I try to protect my income options outside of the Alamy (or any other) low price deal.
This year. My stats for 2 months of July and Aug 2009 are 9 sales to UK nationals. Highest $102. Lowest $40. Average $80.
Last year. My stats for 2 months of July and Aug 2008 are 10 sales to UK nationals. Highest $141. Lowest $76. Average $104.
From the same size collection of approx 3000.
So my opted out stats are only showing the expected general decline in fees overall.
Maybe my pics are only used by newspapers which do not have a deal with Alamy (although if this were the case I would expect number of sales to be significantly down on last year as I presume Alamy intended having deals with a significant percentage of the UK national publishers).
Maybe the subscription deal has not been finalised / is not showing results yet.
I would expect subscription payments to be lower than anyone is reporting so I presume there is, so far, no evidence of these payments which, to contributors, might be yearly / quarterly rather than monthly.
Regards,
David Lyons.
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Tom Reichner wrote:Wirralpix wrote:[quote=DougD]Interesting laws you all have.[/quote Swans in the UK belong to the Queen and you have to get a property release from her to use the images commercialy.  George Your swans belong to the Queen . . . our swans belong to the people. I think I prefer our way.
Maybe the swans just belong to themselves. Thats the way I'd prefer it. Seriously.
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gilwen wrote:See my "Sales for Yesterday" Thread
"Interesting to note that the top sale yesterday was for Sissinghurst with 4 sales 711 views. Interesting because only 20 images of Sissinghurst on ALAMY have property releases and they are all NTPL images. All the rest are unreleased and some are RF with RF unreleased images in the Commercial Collection!! It would be interesting to know if the four sales were all released and therefore NTPL or are Alamy selling unreleased images of NT properties.
Richard"
For the information of fellow contributors, one of the four was mine. I am not a National Trust photographer. Image submitted to Alamy in 2004. Licence type is "Licenced" and I have declared this needs a property release for commercial use and that I do not have one. This image does not appear on the deletion list I received from Alamy several days prior to this sale.
Country: United Kingdom
Usage: Editorial
Media: Book - Retail
Industry: Retail books/magazines/newspapers
Sub-Industry: Miscellaneous
Print run: up to 5,000
Placement: Inside
Image Size: 1/2 page
Start: Thursday, April 16, 2009
End: Friday, April 16, 2010
$ 41.77
With best wishes,
David Lyons.
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Chuck and Robert.
Chuck. No need for an apology. I just wish Alamy could see the advantage of encouraging photographers to use well worded, relevant descriptions rather than punishing their ranking for doing so. I think their stance arose from the number of idiots in the earlier years of Alamy who thought it was wise to cut and paste two or three pages from a guide book and drop it into the description field in the misguided hope that this huge number of search words would increase the frequency of their picture being viewed and thereby purchased. One of Alamy's strengths is the diversity stemming from its unedited model but they have been plagued by this type of what I call "unprofessionalism" from the outset and have expended a huge amount of energy trying to get on top of it what with introducing new keywording, Alamyrank etc. I often think if only Alamy spent as much effort on improving "professional" issues as they do on combating "unprofessional" issues this could be a really good agency. They do not seem to have the courage to police their own premises, instead they prefer to invent and reinvent software fixes to do it for them. Not surprising I guess from a business which has always had more interest in computers than photography.
I do still have description fields sentences in some of my shots on Alamy and use them to "make sense" of a picture where this is difficult to do with separate keywords and where the extra information might give the buyer the "story" of a very specific location. (e.g. AFJ1Y6). But with Alamy there is always the worry of the ranking penalty they impose for false results. My concern for Robert's less specific use of words can be better understood if you put in the four search words fast food restaurants china . The good news is that, partly because they are very recently uploaded pictures, 12 of his photographs come up on the first page of 102 results. The bad news is that only 7 of them show what the searcher was actually looking for - 4 others are of a cathedral and one is a woman pulling a baggage cart. All five brought up by unnecessary words in Robert's description field. These false results will act to drag his true results down into the pit that never sees the light of day. For every two steps forward he might be taking one backward. Alamy will not even tell us what the weighting is, what the ranking penalty is vis-à-vis a zoom, a sale, versus a false result derived from the keyword or description fields etc. We just know that it hurts us. Every time there is a search for Notre Dame Cathedral, which must be quite frequent, Robert will get a false hit on his Guangzhou cathedral. (And the same for Napoleon - after spellcheck). Its only a few of Roberts photographs that need attention but I do think it could help. I am all for descriptions and much of what Robert writes is useful. It is a gamble we all have to figure out for ourselves with the assistance of advice and experience but I think we should all be aware of the traps because, with Alamy, I think it is very, very important to keep your ranking high. Sadly it is even more important for less experienced photographers starting out on Alamy as their inexperience will lead to their rank falling faster. Experienced photographers new to Alamy or keywording already probably have a well honed and intuitive grasp of captioning which is more easily tranferred. (All this complexity never use to happen - I blame the computers parents).
Like you, Chuck, I am very happy with my income from Alamy. I also owe them thanks for introducing me to the wild and wonderful logistical mayhem of organic internet financial modelling schemes about which I think someone, somewhere, knows quite a lot. I just wish they showed a bit more interest in the profession of photography.
More than enough.
Regards to both.
David.
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Hello Chuck,
I am not sure what it is you are disagreeing with me about. If you re-read my post, we are not really in contradiction on any of the points I have made. I think you will see I agree with you wholeheartedly on the importance of descriptions in influencing the purchase of editorial material. Unfortunately it is Alamy that does not as they continue to allow them to contribute toward your ranking. If you look at a good cross section of Robert's description fields do you not think that some of his more wordy entries, on balance, will have a negative result on his ranking due to false returns on too many unnecessary words? Most of the necessary words or phrases should already be in the keyword fields. If Alamy de-coupled description from ranking then I wouldn't even mention it.
I have a great deal of respect for the quality of professional work you have produced over the years Chuck. You are exactly the kind of photographer I hope Robert might find for good advice. For his benefit, can I ask you to address his post, not mine, and be more specific about your concerns and give him some concrete recommendations relative to his situation as a supplier to editorial and as a newcomer to selling online stock. He does not need to know that your pictures come in the top ten in searches. He needs to know why.
Best wishes,
David.
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ROBERT WROTE:
[I am getting close to the 300 mark after joining for 3 months... I live in China for a little more than 7 years now and eastern Germany for 6. If I can make from 600-1000 us per month that would be enough for me to feed my family of 4. I am desperately trying to do so. After having left the United states for 16 years I can really say that wester society is a society of materialism and waste. I am not anti American or anything.
Everyday I hope to get a sale so I can have enough for my child to return to school. I have an old canon D30 since 2000 and after using it for 7 years I had no idea how to sale stock until recently. I have never sold an image, only was hugely dissapointed to find my images were below par as there was not enough megapixles. So Imade some serious sacrifices and got a new 40D.
Everywhere I go I take my gear. We pray that we can start making sales soon as the economy plunges.
The Earth has enough for each mans need and not every mans greed. Try to be happy with what you receive, and remember there are those who have less.
The truth is I love my camera and may die poor. Sometimes I hate trying to look for money from my images and really especially dont like taking pictures of whimsical stock images.
I am dead serious about it.]
Robert,
I think you have the beginnings of a very useful set of photographs here. It is unusual to see good, intimate, documentary style pictures from the inside and some of these will surely find editorial markets. I hope you do not mind if I give some words of advice - I speak as someone whose sole income all my life has been from selling my non studio photographs. There is a huge and fast growing number of photographs on Alamy and it is important that your photographs can be seen toward the top of this pile. Your advantage at present is that your subject matter and locations do not have very much competition. Your disadvantage is the large number of words which appear in the "description" field of many of your pictures. I understand that you want to give useful background information or opinions which would be of assistance to picture editors etc. Unfortunately on Alamy these words in the description field are still included in the keyword search (although they are given a lower significance than those in the actual keyword fields). This means that many of your words will produce "false" results i.e. your pictures will appear on a word search which has no relation to the actual content of that particular photograph. Alamy do not want their buyers to be presented with large numbers of irrelevant pictures so they punish false searches by pushing all of you pictures further down into the pile (Alamy calls this mechanism AlamyRank). Most buyers only ever search a little way down into the pile. So if your pictures are too far down, they will never be seen, so can not sell. I can not emphasise this too much. Avoiding false results might even be as important as the quality of your photographs. Alamy have said that at some time they might make the description field still visible to buyers but detached from word searches (and thereby from ranking) but there is no sign of this happening so far. I have nearly completed the removal of most of my description field information for this reason even though my personal feeling is that this extra information can be very useful to the buyer. In my opinion some of your pictures have far too many irrelevant words in the description field.
Also I guess many of your black and white pics were originally in colour. For commercial reasons it might be better to consider leaving them in colour which then gives the buyer the option of using them in colour or B/W.
With your style of photography and content it might be worth also looking at agencies which specialise in social documentary material, for example I think Panos could make use of your type of work. Also check out the China based agencies. With documentary photography it is probably better to avoid exclusive contracts unless the agency are really helpful to you. Alamy is good as a seller of editorial pictures but other agencies can actively engage with you and your photography, giving advice and suggestions for shoots, themes, locations. Alamy does not do this.
You will make money if your subjects, your quality, your style and your locations are of interest to the market. I think the internal market inside China is still quite small but growing (you will know better than me). A lot of photographers have been photographing China in the last few years but they tend to take the "icon" shots or tourist places. You have some good shots of real China and real people. Do you have pictures from Eastern Europe?
Many people have photographs on Alamy really as a hobby - they make their living money from another occupation. I think it is possible for you to make a living, in your situation, from your photography
- if you edit your images and your words carefully
- if you use two or three established, professional agencies (the microstock type of agencies are of absolutely no use for making money from your style of work).
- if you develop your work in well edited themed sets
- if, judging from what you have on Alamy, you have a base of probably at least 2000 pictures, preferably covering several provinces or locations.
- if you can find good advice from people who already make a living from selling photographs. Technical quality aside, there really is a difference between taking photographs as an enthusiast and taking photographs as a profession. In one it does not matter if they do not sell. In the other it does.
Good luck with it. I like the humanity I see in your photography.
Kind regards,
David.
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