Earning money (?) from travel photography on Alamy

I looked recently at what sort of financial return I typically get from shooting model released stock photos on Alamy.

Now for overseas travel in Europe. How does that pay?

Holiday 1 - ten days in Spain, touring.
Costs - on holiday with the family
Date - June 2004
Sales - 13
Income - Alamy gross $3,179 Me £871
Income per day per annum - £22

Holiday 2 - seven days in France, touring.
Costs - on holiday with the family
Date - June 2006
Sales - 2
Income - Alamy gross $84 Me £23
Income per day per annum - £1

Holiday 3 - two days in Paris.
Costs - weekend away with the wife
Date - Sept 2006
Sales - 1
Income - Alamy gross $114 Me £38
Income per day per annum - £9

'Holiday' 4 - one day in Rome.
Costs - a day trip; no overnight stay; rained all day; travel etc £50
Date - Jan 2006
Sales - 4
Income - Alamy gross $515 Me £170 - £50 = £120
Income per day per annum - £60

What is "Income per day per annum"? It's how much I have earned each year subsequently from a day spent shooting. Ignoring the processing time. I also ignore the first six months after the shoot when no cash comes in. It's conspicuous that even the best of these rates is less than the "Income per hour per annum" from many stock shoots featured in the separate model released shooting exercise.

'Holiday 4' was not really a holiday at all. It was a day trip to test the effectiveness of using low cost airlines to 'blitz' a destination. Perhaps the rain helped. Although it dramatically reduced the actual number of photos captured. It's worth mentioning that many of the images were captured as transparencies - the last time that I have done that. In the end, only 15 images went onto Alamy.

My usual approach - holidays 1 -3 - is that I don't go out of my way to get images. I'm on holiday. With the family. The photography does not really impinge on the holiday. But when I return, there is probably days of processing. And looking at the statistics, I should be far more critical of the time spent doing that processing, because it's not working out to be a remotely sensible way of spending my time.

Fundamentally there's a competition problem on Alamy when it comes to travel. Thousands of photographers putting photos online to sell from the same locations visited, most of which are too boring these days for the travel mags to chat about. At least in the way that most of us take those images. I've got to get myself into a different mindset to avoid taking the same photos as everyone else. But I clearly don't. I'm on holiday - I don't want to think too hard about photography.

In a way I'm sitting with the many hobby stock photographers whose travel stock photos form a huge proportion of what's on Alamy where money does not matter too much.

But for me, time spent processing on my return home for me means that I'm not earning money elsewhere. And I know all the more now after doing this exercise that putting my holiday photos up for sale (with the odd exception) is is a bad business decision.

I really don't think my statistics will be too different from other people's on Alamy. But that won't stop about 2000 more travel shots being uploaded tomorrow....

Do model released images on Alamy make money???

I've been analysing the effectiveness of Alamy as a home for selling stock images with a particular interest in financial results against time invested. Alamy is not the obvious place for model released imagery, but as I wait patiently for images to emerge from the Getty quality control process, it's the only place I've got. By all accounts Getty will yield substantially better results, but that's still to be tested.

Shoot 1 - two models at smart location. Images posted mainly as RF.
Costs - a model commission on sales and/or exchange of other services
Date - two shortish days in September 2004 - say 10 hours shooting
Sales - 19
Income - Alamy gross $3,179 Me (before commissions payable) £1,112
Income per hour of shoot per annum - £30

Shoot 2 - spur of the moment shoot with model but very specific social/health issue subject matter. Images posted as L and RF.
Costs - a model commission on all sales
Date - January 2005 - 1 hour shooting
Sales - 5
Income - Alamy gross $629 - Me (before commissions payable) £220
Income per hour of shoot per annum - £88

Shoot 3 - model on location. Images posted mainly as RF.
Costs - a lunch plus model commission on all sales
Date - June 2006 - 3 hours shooting
Sales - 6
Income - Alamy gross $1492 - Me (before commissions payable) £519
Income per hour of shoot per annum - £86

Shoot 4 - 2 models on location
Costs - a lunch plus a hefty model commission on cumulative sales above £500
Date - November 2006 - 4 hours shooting
Sales - 8
Income - Alamy gross $699 - Me (before commissions payable) £245
Income per hour of shoot per annum - £40

The income figures do not look too bad here in terms of the time spent on the shoot itself. But the snag is that shoot time is rather less than the processing and submission time.

So what is "Income per hour of shoot per annum"? It's how much I have earned each year subsequently from an hour spent shooting. Before model commission. And ignoring all the set up and processing time. I ignore the first six months after the shoot when no cash comes in.

It's not huge bucks, but shows that money can be made from stock. Just on Alamy.

I've not included here some relatively aimless shooting I've done. Having good saleable subject matter is so important to generating income from stock photography. Which is why I've been suitably vague about the subject matter of these shoots.

Photoshelter Collection closes its doors

Images approved, but like Photoshelter, not live.

It makes me realise that photoconnect is still here. Six years on and a fair few photographers have actually sold photographs. Some might even think it a successful investment of their time. Which pleases me.

Because for all the bluster and initiatives like Shoot the Blog and Shoot the Day, not one of the thousands of contributors could have made remotely enough money to repay the time spent shooting and for some loading thousands of photos. Of course the vast majority made nothing.

Photoshelter, as exemplified by Shoot the Blog, was an agency run by luvvies who knew how to use technology and create a buzz, but not what to sell. Or how. If only Alamy could move their technology at one tenth the speed of Photoshelter, they might be dangerous.

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...

Alamy crunch

The re-ranking of stock photo search image order at Alamy was just over a week ago now. Just peaking at the ordering of a few random searches was not encouraging for me - now I can look at the 'Alamy Measures' statistics for the last week to find that the number of images viewed in that week are 37% of what they were for a random week pulled up from a month ago. Photos 'zoomed' (inspected at a larger size by potential buyers) are down by a similar amount.

At Alamy one has to generate $250 in commission in a month to receive a cheque. That commission is traceable back to sales first reported a few months ago. So when I look this month and see that I might not be receiving a monthly cheque for the first time in perhaps 18 months and couple this with the new image ordering I get more a little concerned about how things are going.

Right now I have more pressing things to get on with than to worry about Alamy. But I do keep rudimentary statistics to give me an idea of results and whether they make it all worth the effort and I will update these soon.

Stirring it at Alamy

Stirring the image order that is.

The Alamy images presented to buyers are ordered by a programme called "Alamyrank". Every so often its algorithm changes - at the last change it boosted more of my images than ever to the top of the pecking order. This coincided more or less with a 50% reduction in my monthly sales that has continued for the last four months.

Now there has been a reordering again and my images have been pushed down again somewhere into the bunch. Let's see what happens to sales...

Alamyrank seems like an unregulated see saw. The boards even report images that have sold being pushed to the bottom of searches.

Meanwhile over at QC....

Alamy Quality Control continues to reject images from my Canon EOS 5D ("interpolation artefacts") while my images from a Ricoh GX100 tiny digicam continue to pass with flying colours.

Hey guys, those 'artifacts' are actually Christmas lights scattered amid the branches of the trees on Oxford Street!

Shock! Alamy expel contributor...

See http://www.stockphototalk.com/the_stock_photo_industry_/2008/02/alamy-contract.html
According to the Alamy Blog "his response was that he hadn't got a release but was maybe hoping to track the person down later"

Now I know that within the collection are several virtual CDs from big name agencies who have ticked the Model Released boxes where there can be no model releases and the Property Released box where there can be no property release. I wonder if they are to be thrown out too? A plea of ignorance does not wash here, it's simply an attempt to get images seen in searches when they should not be coming up at all.

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.