Stock agency Alamy cuts photographers' commissions

[Isaac]

Alamy, the London-based stock imagery company, has announced that it will cut photographers' commission rates from January 2013

[Justan]

So they’re gonna cut the margin so that they have more revenue to “invest,” and from the investments, the goal is to bring in more revenue.

 

[Eric Myrvaagnes]

So they’re gonna cut the margin so that they have more revenue to “invest,” and from the investments, the goal is to bring in more revenue.

 

... so that they can cut the margin again and invest more ...

[Isaac]

so that they have more revenue to “invest,”

It's always advantageous to be in the position of investing someone else's profits in your enterprise ;-)

[louoates]

If you've been in the stock photography business long enough you understand this trend. The immutable law of supply and demand regarding image supply have simply been asserting itself. Commissions will continue to slide downward even faster with the improvement in cell phone image quality and the thousands, even millions of potential image contributors. Add in the number of stock agencies racing to establish cell phone collections and you have incredible supplies about to hit the market. This will prove catastrophic to those photographers trying to eck out a living on conventional stock photography.

[KevinA]

What the mail should of said was.

Dear Contributor,

As you know the state of the market is poor right now, it's a situation created by the agencies themselves, we have been in a downward spiral competing with each other to sell as many of your images as cheap as we possibly can, with scant regard to what you our supplier gets out of the deal.

We have explored the markets we are in by finding new ways to sell cheaper, but honestly because of the downward pricing we have created we need to expand into other new markets and to do that we need to be even cheaper. As we are trying to maintain and increase our profit we can not afford to make any less per sale on the stupidly low  prices we charge.

So we came up with this great idea and that's for you to take the hit, yes we can actually sell your product cheaper and make more money per sale! Great isn't it, win win for us here at Alamy.

Let me explain on the old system say we sold an image for 10 you got 6 and we got 4, with  the new system we can now sell the same image for 9 now you get 4.5 and we get 4.5 and we can continue the downward spiral. So you think you will be loosing 10% from 10 but actually you will be loosing 10% from 9 because it gives us room to be cheaper but increase our profit per sale.

What's not to like, our profit goes up and we can spin it to look like your profit might go up as well with expanding markets. But honestly history shows your income always goes down so ours can go up.

[N Walker]

James West, those wider eyes of innocence - http://www.alamy.com/Blog/contributor/archive/2012/11/20/5275.aspx

[Ellis Vener]

The house always wins.