ALAMY Q2 2007 FIGURES

Alamy has released their second quarter 2007 figures on contributors, percentage revenue and average pricing which shows no major change from the previous quarter. In the quarter they added 897,277 images to their collection, slightly fewer than in the previous quarter. They now have over 9.15 million images on their site.Alamy still does not release revenue, except to provide average price-per-image licensed figures. RF sales were responsible for 31% of total revenue, down from 34% in the previous quarter. Despite this decline in revenue RF suppliers added 352,691 new images to the collection a 32% increase over the number of RF images added in the previous quarter.

There was little change in the number of individuals and agencies adding RF and RM compared with the previous quarter, but the number of RM images added was down 20% from the previous quarter. This would seem to indicate that many suppliers are now focused on supplying more RF images rather than RM at precisely the time when RM sales are increasing relative to RF.

It should be noted that this trend is probably unique to Alamy and not representative of what is happening in the industry overall. Over 90% of Alamy's sales are for editorial uses and the average price for editorial uses was $133 per image. Many of these customers can't afford the higher priced RF images which had an average price of $220 in the quarter. In addition, editorial customers tend to want content specific images, not the more generic images typically found in RF. Put both of these factors together and it may go a long way to explaining why Alamy's RF sales are falling while that is not necessarily the case in much of the rest of the industry.

Alamy's RF sales may also have been impacted by micropayment. It is well known that some of the editorial customers who had been using RM prior to the introduction of micropayment are now finding a significant number of the images they need on micropayment sites. In addition, because individual photographers, rather than agencies, are the ones posting on micropayment sites, there may be a variety of subject matter that attracts the editorial user.

Alamy has been trying for some time to build commercial sales, but despite strengthening their collection in this area they don't seem to be making much headway in selling to commercial users. The average price per commercial image licensed has been dropping over the last two-and-a-half years and the number of commercial licenses is also dropping.

For image suppliers the most useful figure is the average return-per-image (RPI) of all their images in the collection. This figure cannot be calculated from the data Alamy provides. (See Story Understanding RPI.) In talking to photographers, some who edit tightly and produce high demand subject matter indicate that they earn an annual RPI of about $10. There are those that earn somewhat less than this and I would be surprised if Alamy's overall gross sales are greater than $5.00 per image in the file.

Growing Collection

Among the things that can be gleaned from the Alamy statistics are that the average photographer uploaded 160 images in the quarter down from 173 in Q1. The average agency uploaded 2,424 images, up from 2,094 images in Q1, but still lower than the 2,773 uploaded in Q4 2006. There could be many factors that affect these averages, including new agencies that might have decided to participate and made large initial submissions.

The percent of revenue generated by images from photographers has been steadily going up and reached 53% for the quarter. Meanwhile, the percentage of revenue generated by agency images has gone from 61% two-and-half years ago to 47% in Q2 2007. In that same period of time photographers added 3,859,715 new images and agencies added 3,118,216 images.

Given the shift in revenue it is somewhat surprising that there isn't a bigger spread in the number of images added. My suspicion is that this also goes back to those editorial customers. Many of the agencies are submitting generic images aimed at the commercial market and such images aren't having a whole lot of success on Alamy. Many of the photographers, on the other hand, tend to supply images that are narrowly focused in terms of their potential use. Often these are images that the big agencies wouldn't accept.

These images may not sell as frequently as generic images, but they fill a need for editorial customers who have trouble finding the same type of imagery elsewhere.

Alamy Numbers - 2005-2007