Alamy has announced that it paid out over £8 million (approximately $12.5 million) to its contributors in 2009. The company has not reported gross revenue for the 4th quarter. It has been the company’s practice to publicly report quarterly results about two months after the end of each quarter, although as a private company they are not legally required to make such reports. Data for the first three quarters of 2009 can be found here.
Alamy pays 60% of each sale to the photographer, one of the highest royalties in the industry. Of the £8 million, around £5 million went to individual photographers rather than picture agencies.
The company had a little over $31 million in sales in 2008. Depending on how much over £8 million the payment to contributors was, gross revenue for 2009 was probably in the neighbourhood of $21 million, which would mean a 32% decline since the previous year. Income in the fourth quarter was certainly down compared to the third.
Alamy currently has 17.87 million images online and licenses rights to around 200,000 images on an annual basis.
Head of content Alan Capel said: “Yes, it’s a tough market, but we’ve come through a tough year and are still turning a good profit. In these testing economic times for us all, we feel it’s even more important that we return the largest share of the sale to the creator of the image. This can in turn lead to the production of a steady supply of high-quality imagery.”