jbtaylor wrote:Hi folks. This is my first trip to this side of the forum. I am sure this question has been asked but,
What is stock photography?
How does Alamy fit in with that?
Where does one go to find out about generating revenue from their work?
Thanks.
JT
Alamy is unique. Some 40,000 applicants have signed up but only 16,000 have ever passed the basic quality control test to become contributors. Once past this stage, there is almost no control - no editing. You can get rejected if you send poor work (it will fail the QC applied to each submission) and you can also get kicked off for breaking basic rules like submitting more than five 'similars' (same model, same subject, same view without significant differences). But, if you submit competent work and stick with the rules, you can have a very large image library and pay no fees for its hosting. I now have around 8,000 images at Alamy.
The downside is that back in 2002 when I started using Alamy, typical fees were $150-$300-$450 and that even applied to Royalty Free images. Now, the influence of microstock libraries ($3 a pop) has been so great that Alamy average fees are more like $60-$100 per usage - and the rate of sales has fallen, too. Shooting general travel and scenic, human interest and environment shots as I do the return is about $1 per image per year compared to $3 per image per year five years ago. So all the extra pix I keep adding are just maintaining a regular income of around $8,000 a year from which Alamy will soon be deducting 40% instead of 35%. To maintain my $5,000 or so net return I have to add about 100 new shots every month.
However, I would be shooting all these pix anyway. I need them for my business (articles and magazines) anyway and we go on photo shoot trips where other people might take a holiday. And, I do not see them as 'work for money' - in the process, I've built an 8,000-image fully corrected, captioned, keyworded image library which I also have on my local system and which I can in theory put with other agencies or use to make a direct sales system. This is an asset more like an investment. Go to a bank and ask them how you money you need to invest with them to get $5,000 back each year in interest. Ask your lottery operator how much you will need to spend to be absolutely sure of making a $5,000 profit each year
Work out how much you need to spend on a property to get $5,000 net return from renting it out.
Then, add to this the wildcard factor - if you manage to fit the right shot to the right buyer, you can still win the lottery. You could get $25,000 in a single licence sale. My favourite sale of all time was a couple of years ago, when a KM A2 snapshot of an airport bus stop sign in Prague was licenced for over £1,000 (at that time over $2,000). Creativity is not the big thing with stock sales, especially editorial sales (this was actually to a top ad agency). Relevance is king.
David
