As to US buyers, Alamy has solid footing in US textbook market, & foot-in-door with lots of others, US consumer publications, e.g., Wall Street Journal, inflight magazines, travel guidebooks, etc. My edu-guess is that new US office will offer a lot more personal service which a lot of buyers like…?

My current biggest concern is that search engine stemming was dropped around Aug 7 to make searches more accurate & what effect it will have on future sales #s.

The stock agencies love these deals because it brings in relatively stable income and the cost of supporting a sales team in much lower than all of the advertising it would take to bring in the equivalent amount of revenue.

But I think Alamy will have a tough time with this since Getty, Corbis & Jupiter already have deals with the major volume picture buyers. Alamy can only grab these accounts at the expense of the other agencies. Maybe Alamy thinks that they have some competitive advantage that will help them grab these accounts. Hopefully, it won’t just be by low-balling on price.

I am sure that their chosen tactic to get US market share will be aggressive discounting. They are exporting their race to the bottom.

I opened a branch of a Rights Managed-only US stock agency in the UK in 2006. Not only was the Euro/Pound on the upswing but the market for Rights Managed stock was extremely healthy in Europe. It seemed that no self-respecting art buyer or photo editor would consider Royalty Free for a “serious” project, much less microstock.

Needless to say, the environment in the US is decidedly different. Taking a look at the Rights Managed work offered by Alamy, I doubt that US photo buyers will shell out RM rates when RF and microstock can be had for 1/10th or 1/100th the cost in some cases.

One the one hand, I have hard time believing that Alamy doesn’t know what they are getting into. On the other hand, if they think they can derive significant revenue by selling RM into the US market, then they’re nuts.

Alamy is time-consuming. I (along with all contributors) were asked to re-keyword all of the images in the files. That was time consuming and I’ve not seen an increase in zooms to the images or increased sales.

What a clever way to increase corporate revenue!

That would be awesome tho if they had said they were giving photographers a raise to keep them happy and help out in the bad economic times ahead…

I think the press release says that are increasing the percentage to photographers by 5 percent.

Cameron

“……www.alamy.com/Blog/contributor/archive/2008/09/24/3563.aspx

If you prefer, they are summarised below.

This is to give you advance notice that our royalty percentage
will be increasing by 5% in early 2009 for direct and distributor
sales.

The change applies to all images from all our contributors,
regardless of which commission structure you are on. We’re making
this change to fund a shift in strategy for the company which,
we believe, will lead to a significant increase in gross payments
to our contributors. We’re starting by opening a dedicated sales
office in the USA…..”

On a serious note it could be too little too late. Alamy was the great white hope when Getty started abusing their contributors. I was a big fan, but recently contributing to them has become more work than it is worth in financial returns.

If they did this 5 years ago it would have been great news.

Other than the fact that the pound & euro are completely kicking the hell out of the dollar these days, I can’t quite figure how they plan to succeed against Getty, et al., when the Photoshelter Collection [which had a decent amount of money behind it] just folded.

Steve

Their office in the UK is not in London, yet they’ll pay NYC rents for what?