Acclaim Images

Acclaim was at one time one of Photoconnect's direct competitors in that it it took in images from other photographers and garnered business by doing well in Google searches. Now it too has put up the signs regarding not taking in new photos - or photographers presumably.

After I stopped taking in new photographers here and Photoconnect became essentially just me, I felt fine about trying to sell my own images through Acclaim and uploaded about 80 images. Of these I only fed about 30 through to go live on the site because although my images carried IPTC data, it was still an unexpected slog getting them onto the site proper.

Athough on the outside Acclaim seemed a slick operation, on the inside things were a little different and the clarity of purpose seen in Fred Voetsch's postings on the StockPhoto group etc was replaced by a variety of messages giving the impression of a folksy setup trying to mix it with the big boys. In particular the obscure and/or lengthy image requests were coming thick and fast, a little like MyLoupe (another failure for me) and I was getting the impression that I had signed up for OnRequest images, not a stock photo site.

I looked at the sales page (for the whole site - they are quite open with this information) a couple of days ago and while I would be very happy to see something similar at photoconnect in terms of the number of images sold, there was no way that I could see this level of sales supporting Acclaim and its staff. That has been borne out by today's news of 3 staff being laid off. Since 2 are family members it must all be a bit emotional right now.

So it seems that Acclaim, like photoconnect, will sit there high in the searches and continue running. It seems that there will be a purge of images (there was a pointed post on StockPhoto a couple of weeks ago re similars).

Now where for photoconnect?

Occasion(al) photography

It's a little strange that someone who claims to be a professional photograoher should go along to a 50th birthday clebration and plead for forgiveness on the basis that he just does not usually do this sort of thing - you know - take photos of people wearing black ties enjoying themselves. Yet this is what I was doing on Staurday night.

Not only did I enjoy it, but I also am actually rather pleased with the results. I experimented in my usual way and quite often the experiments came off.

And I enjoyed the party too.

Anyway, see my occasion photography here.....

Just how well is Alamy doing?

If you look at photoconnect.net then you will see that I sell images through Alamy and some of the images on photoconnect carry a link straight through to Alamy where buyers can download images and pay.

I am not sure if I've ever sold an image through this route because there is no way of tracking. However I have been looking at my overall sales through Alamy to see how things are progressing there. The only sensible way of doing this is not to look month on month (because monthly figures fluctuate so much) but to measure over a period - in my case I look at a rolling 6 month sales pattern and compare these sales with the number of images estimated to be online at the end of the six month period. I then translate that figure into $ invoiced sales per year (gross).

Before June 2004 with fewer images online it's difficult to pick up anything useful but since then this is what I see:

6/2004 800 images $3.16 per image per year
9/2004 900 images $2.83 per image per year
12/2004 1000 images $2.44 per image per year
3/2005 1100 images $3.16 per image per year5
6/2005 1200 images $2.99 per image per year
9/2005 1300 images $3.76 per image per year
12/2005 1400 images $4.87 per image per year
3/2006 1600 images $4.60 per image per year
6/2006 1800 images $5.81 per image per year
9/2006 2000 images $5.58 per image per year

The important thing is that there is a growing trend, which makes me feel happy because I appear to be good at getting the right sort of images to Alamy and, importantly, am getting better at doing so.

It's worth looking at this to this point because of the change in the way the Alamy search engine works. I always used to be in the bottom of the 3 tiers of photographers results as shown up in searches. Now I am gratified to find my images near the top, even for my 'specialist' collections where I have hundreds of images online.

When my images were at the back of the search results they did not get to be seen often but when they did I guess that they generated above average views and sales. Hopefully now they will be seen more often with an impact on my sales per image per year. We will see.

Pole dancing photos

A friend took me to see some pole dancers last night....

http://www.photoconnect.net/_personal/poledancing/

Her teacher features in the last frames.

An encounter with Yell customer services

I raised the issue of London Commercial Photography very nice person at Yell Customer Services

"I am sorry that you feel like that" she said about 6 times (as a carefully worded alternative to "I am sorry we are crap") as I explained that three clicks a week would as likely as not get a nil return on my over £700 investment in Yell.com services. I explained that other photographers would like me jump ship at the end of the term and if this happened they would be left with one advertiser occupying all the positions.....

She had explained to me that as long as an advertiser had an arrangement with someone in the building, even just to collect mail, then it was a legitimate use of the premises from the point of view of Yell.

From the point of view of Yell, LCP's contribution to their coffers would be a lot more than mine so you might not be too surprised that they were not volunteering to do anything...

The Lavender Hill Mob

It's a Yell.com post again.

If you search on Yell for a commercial photographer in SW11 then you will find a listing for 'London Commercial Photography" at 168 Lavender Hill. Since I happened to be passing I thought I'd pop in to get a few photos done.

Funny thing is that 168 Lavender Hill is a branch of Foxtons Estate Agents. Must be upstairs I thought, so I went to the side entrance - nothing to do with photography on the nameplates there - so I went and asked the two nice receptionists. Who looked at me clueless.

What a shame, I could not get my photo taken beacause there does not appear to be a photographer st this address.

Just a quick update on where we are this month. Seven visitors so far, 1 November to today, the 14th.

Free photos! (Maybe.....)

It's been a while getting around to it but at last I've set up my fight back against the relentless march of the micro agencies - yes free photos!

Well not quite free of course. It's a pretty restricted list of beneficiaries and anyone using a photo has to provide a link back to this site. That link helps with the Google ranking here and accordingly will help the site get found by people who will be paying for photos.

And what is the point of giving away images to governments and schools? Easy - no link is of more value than one from an educational establishment or government organisation. Links from these sites are a huge spur to online marketing efforts because they are so difficult to get and they are going to be genuine. So links from them give a site credibility and Google regards them as of being of much greater value than other links.

And some photographers object to giving photos to charities. I've always regarded giving money to certain charities as being a waste of money. For example, hospitals. Give £500m to the health service and the government (who will always fund it to the lowest level that is politically acceptable) will give £500m less. But overseas charities are different. No one cares too much how much is given to support people overseas, so they need it more.

And the page itself should of course pull in the punters looking for free photos. With the new watermark (it's not actually on the photo but it will seem it is) and the photo click protection the defences are up. It's not foolproof but it makes it just a bit more difficult.

Yell effectiveness update.....

I received the invoice from yell today (ouch!) so thought it worth checking out just how things are progressing on the campaign front.....

So far in November I have had one visitor. That adds to the seven in October (one of whom was me).

That's seven visitors to date, one of whom visited my contact page (a 'conversion for the statistics!') although I did not hear from them.

So in 15 days, seven clicks. Ongoing cost is £4.25 per click.

Since signing up a search on 'Commercial and Industrial Photographer - London' shows up at least 30 adverts for "One Shot Photography", "London Studio Photography" and "London Corporate Photography", all of which seem to operate from the same set of addresses.

What looked to be an equitable playing field with other photographers all of whom seemed to have single adverts seems to have been taken over by a single faceless entity.....

Probably a good explanation for only one click so far this month.

Happy Birthday Paris!

peronal imagesWhat better way of spending a 50th birthday (excepting a time time machine) than in Paris? Shirley and I deposited our dear children with their friends and off we went on Eurostar...

You can see photos from Paris on sale on photoconnect and in this personal selection.