In the summer of 2005, Alamy
began supplying quarterly operational statistics that demonstrated the company’s steady growth. This information has been useful to image suppliers; it not only shed light on what was happening at Alamy, but also functioned as a measure of the industry overall.
This information became particularly important after Getty Images went private and no longer reported its quarterly activity. Since then, Alamy’s figures represented the only reliable publicly available data in the industry.
In the second quarter of 2008, Alamy hit a peak of $8,530,000 in sales in one quarter. Revenue has been steadily declining since. For 2009, Alamy was down 27% compared to 2008. Gross revenue for the fourth quarter of 2009 was $5,602,000. Anecdotal information indicates that revenue may be holding at about that level—in the range of $20 million per year.
In April 2010, Alamy made the decision to stop publishing financial information. The company said: “In the absence of any similar data from our competitors, we no longer see the value of these numbers as a comparative benchmark of what is happening in the industry. For this reason, we have decided to put more emphasis on our customer-facing communications instead.”