Italian diversion

A long time since the last post but I've been to Italy for a holiday, did some stock photography and have posted the results:

Flew to Pisa:

Leaning Tower of Pisa, Duomo etc
The rest of the city

Train to Lucca

Duomo and other churches
Lucca - people and streets

Train to Florence

Cathedral, Duomo Santa Maria del Fiore. and other churches
Streets, people, views and Ponte Vecchio

Jilted on my date with Naomi

I was writing earlier in the week about heading to Terminal 5 to get some photos yesterday - sure enough I was there yesterday afternoon; what I did not mention (because I keep these things to myself) is that I was meeting up with Naomi Campbell to take a few pics and discuss how I could help further her career if I could take a few pics of her doing lifestyle chores around my house. You know, hoovering, ironing, dusting.....

Anyway, while I was there, handbags happened.

So I had to make do with taking pics of the terminal. Which I can't load to this post because Blogger is being temperamental. So I put them on Photoconnect.

Heathrow Terminal 5 stock photos

Sorry, no photos of Naomi.

Assignment sales update

While the internet advertising continues to pull in a few enquiries the major play I will be making is to make direct contact with second tier design agencies in London. Yesterday I took receipt of 500 postcards designed to attack the market for the photography of "Real people" in "Real locations". It's what I do best and generates photography for brochures, websites and annual reports.

I am convinced that companies and the better designers will soon realise that yet another brochure or website populated with sterile iStockPhoto images will be a disaster. High budget shoots with models are, well, high budget.

The best people to project a business in images are the company's own people.

Tomorrow I take delivery of 800 address labels for these second tier agencies.

Tomorrow, however, is also stock shooting day. Right now I'm looking at Heathrow Terminal 5 and some unglamorous West London industrial architecture. I am anticipating that Terminal 5 will be so chaotic that no one will notice me.....

Alamy stock photo income on slide...

Earlier posts this year will have suggested that Alamy is not working as it once was, but this month has hit a low in that I will be getting no cheque for the first time in years - while there were only 3 sales totalling $292 gross (yes that's before the 35% commission) from 2786 images online.

Downloading sales information from the site and evaluating it in a spreadsheet shows some interesting statistics. I look at rolling six month periods to smooth things out statistically and get the following results - all are gross sales:

December 2004 - $2.44 per image per year
June 2005 - $2.99 per image per year
December 2005 - $4.87 per image per year
June 2006 - $5.81 per image per year
December 2006 - $5.40 per image per year
June 2007 - $5.20 per image per year
December 2007 - $3.75 per image per year

For the last quarter sales are in fact $1.67 per image per year....

So what's going on?

For Alamy, if the growth in images online is not matched by increased sales then the income per photo will fall. And Alamy's sales growth shows every sign of flattening out - you can see that in the graph on their site. With the number of images online more or less doubling since the peak in my sales it is not surprising that my return per image is falling.

For individual photographers, directing more images at Alamy is not the solution. As the per image return falls it becomes a nonsense to throw more images at them. Let's suppose all photographers did that then with the doubling in numbers online the return would halve yet again!

As for the economics, let's say a day's stock photo shooting gets 50 good images, there's about another day to process and keyword and submit all those. At $3 per image per year gross, that's £1 per image per year net or £50 per year in future income for two day's work. Over 5 years discounted, that's a value of about £100 per day. That's before I think of any costs associated with the shoot.

At £200 per day the economics are quite different!

But the interesting thing I have noticed is how RF income in particular has fallen off.

In the 6 months to March 2007 I pulled in 17 sales for $3233 gross. In the 6 months to January 2008 8 sales for $1413. Whereas RF outnumbered L in the halcyon days, L now makes up 75% of sales. This is in particular hitting the sales of some of the shoots that I have done with models with the more commercial market in mind. Here one has to think of microstock as being the major cause.

If one streamlines one's workflow and submits to multiple stock photo agencies then the economics become better. Perhaps then £200 per day is achievable again. But unless Photoshelter takes off, there is no obvious supplement out there in terms of non-exclusive agencies.

Thursday is my timetabled two weekly stock shooting day. This week the weather may be fine. I'm not out of the stock market yet because it can be such a pleasant way of spending the day that even if one earns nothing then it seems OK. In the worst case it's an enjoyable day off and that's the way one must approach it, but don't forget, the processing is hard work and has to be fitted in somewhere.....

Alamyrank and pseudonyms

This is a piece of irony for the statistically obsessed elements on Alamy.

Alamy ranks photographers according to pseudonym. The general message is to delete weaker images, or as I did, at least put them into another pseudonym.

So that is what I did to some extent - until I got bored - about 6 months ago. I put my weaker images into a separate pseudonym, Scott Hortop Images.

Now I have found that the click through rate for these images is 1.31%. And for Scott Hortop (my "better" images) 0.99% (that's measured over the last year or so).

What is going on? Why should my rubbish images (that really do not sell) have a better click through rate than my good images (that do sell)?

I can only now think of one answer right now - image content clutter. In choosing what images to put into my second tier pseudonym, I chose the images that had the most unimpressive cluttered thumbnails. Where it is clear what the image content is - a nice clear image - buyers don't need to click on the new larger thumbnails. So click through rate goes down. Where the content is fuzzy, buyers have to click to see what is there. So click through rate goes up.

Just a thought. The main point is that it's unpredictable how buyers behave.

One thing is sure, had I not carried out this exercise the CTR on my main pseudonym would be greater than 1%. And I think that being less than 1% has sent my Alamyrank over the edge into a lower tier so that my good images are ranked lower than my bad.

So beware! Meddling with pseudonyms can be less than productive...