Alamy First Quarter 2006

2

June 2, 2006

Alamy has reported numbers for Q1 2006 that show another huge growth in supply with 825,052 images added to their database during the quarter. This was up a full 28% from the 644,808 added in Q4 2005 and 86% from the 443,587 added in Q1 2005. The company currently has well over 5 million images in its database and if they haven't hit 6 million by now they certainly will very soon.

(Note: Although it is not clear if you go back to Q1 & Q2 of 2004 I believe that the 1,368,538 is not the total images "submitted" during those two quarters, but rather the total images in the database at the end of Q2.)

Later this year Alamy plans to make the submission process easier by allowing contributors to upload images directly over the internet rather than requiring images to be submitted on CD's or DVD's as is currently their practice. This could lead to an increased volume of submissions.

The average price per RF image licensed remains the same as in Q4 2005 and up 7% from the same quarter a year ago. The average price for an RM image is down 7% from Q4 2005 and down 11% from the same quarter a year ago. The average price for RM images is also 23% lower than the average price for RF.

Alamy doesn't report figures that would enable me to calculate total images licensed or gross revenue so it is impossible to determine whether revenue or the number of units licensed is rising as rapidly as the number of images available. However, anecdotal information from various photographers and agencies indicates that while total sales are probably rising significantly the return-per-image that the suppliers see is actually falling.

It is interesting that the percent of revenue from editorial licenses went up 4% from 65% to 69% of total revenue and the percent of revenue from commercial licenses went down a corresponding 4%. Since the average price for RF images remained the same and the average price of RM went down this would indicate that editorial buyers are purchasing an increasing share of RF images.

One of my theories has been that editorial buyers would be limited in the amount of very generic RF imagery they could use because the imagery required for their various projects tends to have very specific, narrow criteria. But the numbers indicate that more and more frequently editorial buyers are able to find RF images that suit their purposes, and the averages indicate that they are willing to pay more for these RF images than they would have to pay for RM, if they could find what they want as RM.

The average price for each image sold for editorial use was $126. Since editorial buyers are purchasing more RF images at the average $206 rate, that would also indicate that at least some, and maybe many, of the RM images are being licensed for less than the $126 fee.

While an increasing number of photographers are submitting RF, the vast majority still seem to have not caught up with the idea that on average RM images earn LESS per sale than RF. In the quarter 1,435 photographers submitted a total of 95,940 RF images and 2,569 submitted 450,653 RM images. There were 1,134 photographers that submitted both RM and RF.

Since the beginning of 2004 photographers have added 2,561,138 images to the database and agencies have added 1,850,761. Thus while agencies represented only 42% of the total images added they represented 57% of the total revenue generated indicating that there is some advantage when agencies apply some editing standards to submissions. Nevertheless, the percent of agency sales relative to photographer sales is declining and if photographers continue to submit many more images than agencies eventually the total percentage of revenue may level out, but not the average return-per-image.

The following is a detailed chart of the information reported by Alamy.