Rambling CEO

Novel Use announcement

James West - CEO — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 11:35:00 GMT

An opt out has been made available for Novel Use. The opportunity to opt out will be available for two weeks from today. I apologise unreservedly to those of you who feel you have been misled. This was never my intention and it is not the Alamy way of doing things.

To opt out of Novel Use go to My Alamy and follow the link to 'Novel use' under 'Additional revenue opportunities'. Select 'No thanks' and then 'Submit'.

Launch of Limited Use – the first of our Novel Use initiatives

James West - CEO — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 10:33:00 GMT

What the new "Limited Use" search tab will look likeWe are delighted to announce that Limited Use, the first initiative to be released under our Novel Use scheme will launch in the coming weeks.

Limited Use has been devised to let your images compete in the low cost ‘micropayment’ market without undermining your existing revenue streams on Alamy. There are three aspects of this project that we regard as essential:

It must not undermine our existing business, so we have restricted the licence to usages that do not currently feature in our revenue mix.
It must be easy for the customer to use, so licence terms for Royalty Free and Licensed (Rights Managed) images are the same and not time limited.
It must acknowledge the existing low cost pricing structures that are already out there if it is to stand a chance of competing.

This doesn’t mean that all our new pricing strategies from now on will be cut price. Far from it. We have lots of ideas under development this year that should improve our scope for seeking out new revenue streams. More details to follow later.

The terms of the Limited Use scheme are defined below:

Blogs

Use in articles posted by an individual blogger on personal and special interest blogs for an unlimited time. Images cannot be included in a corporate site, used for advertising or promotion or used in a defamatory, sensitive or controversial manner.

Social Networking

For use by an individual on social networking and virtual world websites for an unlimited time. Images cannot be used in advertising, promotion or in a defamatory, sensitive or controversial manner.

Education

For teachers, academics or higher education students on a single user basis for any of the following combinations:

Interactive whiteboards
Hand outs
Project work
Reports
Dissertations/theses
Presentations/lectures

Please note that the images can be used by people working in education as defined above, it will not cover educational publishing which will continue to be sold under our standard model.

We have specifically selected these usages to cover areas where we do not currently sell images. Limited Use was set up to address our need to break into these new markets and to compete with other pricing models that are becoming established.

The pricing for these usages is outlined below. Limited Use will only be visible to buyers in the UK to begin with. (This means that only contributors in the UK will be able to see the changes on the web site when Limited Use is launched.) The service will be rolled out worldwide once we are satisfied with the performance of the scheme.

Size and price
Size	File size	Resolution	Price
XS	0.4 MB	Web 450 x 300 px (16 x 11 cm @ 72 dpi)	£0.60
S	1.4 MB	Electronic media 689 x 462 px (25 x 17 cm @ 72 dpi)	£1.20
M	5.5 MB	A6 print out 1142 x 1688 px (20 x 29 cm @ 150 dpi)	£1.80

We are sensitive to the fact that we are becoming more active in the market where web resolution file sizes are adequate for the usage required. This is one of the reasons why we have brought back watermarking on your images.

If you haven’t signed up to the Novel Use scheme your images won’t be available to these buyers. To sign up visit the Additional Revenue Opportunities page within My Alamy

AlamyMeasures (beta) - follow up note 1

James West - CEO — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 09:14:00 GMT

Thank you for all of your comments and suggestions on the blog and forum pages. This has been very helpful in enabling us to understand what you would like to see done differently. The good news is that there seems to be quite a lot of consensus about what the key issues are.

Your feedback is being reviewed for the next round of changes to AlamyMeasures on which work will start shortly. I will update this blog with more details later.

One of the most common questions is 'why don't all my sales show up?'. This is because the tool only shows sales for search terms where the system is certain that the search term(s) and the sale are linked. It is quite common, for example, for customers to perform a number of searches before making a purchase. This can make it hard to establish a strong correllation between the search and the purchase. We are thinking of ways increase the number of sales that are reported by AlamyMeasures, but for the time being your sales stats are limited to ones for which we are confident of a link.

Many of you have commented on the way in which the search engine is interpreting particular keywords and phrases. We are tackling this in a number of ways - first, the new keywording structure allows you to demote words that are generating strange results for the customer - second, we will shortly be announcing a way for you to report suggested changes to how certain words and phrases are stemmed - third, our search engine team are about to begin work on taking more account of the proximity of words in the keyword fields (this will reduce the impact of, for e.g., combinations of photographer name and a keyword that create an erroneuous match with a phrase that a customer may have searched for).

On a more general note, we're enjoying this beta approach to development! This has got us motivated to look at ways to beta trial other tools for contributors so that we can learn quickly and make improvements to our systems faster in future.

AlamyMeasures (beta) is live!

James West - CEO — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 15:43:00 GMT

AlamyMeasures (beta) provides information about how your pseudonyms and images have been performing in the search engine since March 2007 (this was when we started collecting data for this tool). This is a 'beta' version, which means that feedback from our contributors is required before we can be confident that we have presented the information in a useful and meaningful way. We anticipate that some changes will be necessary, as well as more detailed explanatory notes, before we release version 1.0.

Use AlamyMeasures to get an overview of which searches have had your images included in them and how you measured up against the competition when you were seen. Be careful not to jump to too many conclusions however – we will be providing more guidance on how to interpret this data at a later date.

You can get to AlamyMeasures under the 'Organise images' section of 'My Alamy'.

Please note that our Member Services team are not able to help you with questions regarding this tool. We would, however, still like to hear your suggestions and feedback so please use the comments section of this post to express yourselves!

10 Million pictures on Alamy!

James West - CEO — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 10:00:00 GMT

Many thanks to all of our contributing photographers and photo agencies for helping us reach this exciting milestone. To mark the occasion we are giving an extra 10% commission to our contributors for any sales they make today.

So…photographer Phil Robinson of PjrFoto.com, aka Mr Ten Million, gets the glory:

(many congratulations Phil!)

…and all of you get the money! To increase your chances of a happy result we have emailed our customers and explained why today is a good day to buy pictures.

Next we will be concentrating on delivering the rest of what we promised – more growth, faster and better search results, and better tools for contributors - but first we have cake to eat and a homepage to smile at.

10 million images press release

Alamy Staff UK
Click to see large picture (89Kb)

Alamy Staff India
Click to see large picture (126Kb)

Novel Use Scheme – money from unusual places...

James West - CEO — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 13:42:00 GMT

© Bill FrymireAlamy is often approached by organisations requesting licences that fall outside of our standard price model. Sometimes these may be deals involving a high volume of sales at a low price, other times we have ideas for selling images in new and unusual ways that we don’t feel we can pursue without your consent. Previously Alamy has turned these deals down and filed these ideas away.

To take advantage of these opportunities and to enable us to follow some of our ideas in this area, we are introducing the Novel Use Scheme.

The scheme is optional and shouldn’t be confused with Micropayment. It doesn’t interfere with your existing sales and pricing on Alamy and it can include both RM and RF material. If you opt-in to this scheme your images still remain for sale through the main Alamy site.

If you do sign up however, all of your images (except those with licence restrictions) are locked into the scheme. You can opt-out in April of each year if you wish to.

Sales made through the Novel Use Scheme will be charged at 50%, which is higher than our normal commission charge of 35%. The extra commission is to cover our increased operating costs for these schemes, which are often customised to particular customer’s needs for a project (i.e. we devote technical effort to it), or they have additional hardware and bandwidth requirements associated with them, or both. Pricing will vary from project to project.

We are very excited by these new opportunities. You will shortly be receiving an email letting you know when and how you can sign up, which will be through a link in My Alamy.

Pricing - the Alamy way

James West - CEO — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 12:44:00 GMT

© EyebyteAs a general trend, prices across our industry are falling and appear set to continue to do so. This downward pressure ranges from mild to extreme and results from one or more of the following:

An abundance of images on the market
Customer consolidation (mergers and takeovers in the publishing world)
Aggressive pricing strategies in some stock agencies
Micropayment sites
Erosion of traditional print media by the web
Migration of advertising spending to the web
Uncertain outlook in the global economy

We will shortly be making our revenue figures public for the first time. Our sales figures show us so far sitting outside this broader industry trend: they suggest that our prices are stable and our market share is increasing. This is because we are a growing company that does 70% of its business in the relatively stable secondary editorial market (magazines, non-current affairs sections of newspapers, book publishers, travel companies, etc.).

Later this year we will be releasing a number of new products to broaden our customer base beyond that secondary editorial market. In that expansion our pricing strategy will be one that recognises and respects that prices are falling across the industry but also that contributors need to retain control over how their images are sold.

Photographers need to be able to test the water in some of these growing new markets without cannibalising their sales or devaluing their product in the process. We will endeavour to make this possible for you and I promise that we won't do anything drastic without your consent!

Keywording for the future

James West - CEO — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 14:23:00 GMT

IMPORTANT: This article describes some changes coming to the Alamy keyword fields later this year. Images already in the system will be unaffected by this change and you will not be forced to re-keyword your existing collection.

Synopsis

The number of images available online is increasing dramatically. As a consequence of this picture buyers will spend longer looking for the images they need and image producers will spend more time describing their pictures in order to stand out from the crowd. Alamy, representing the world”s largest collection of stock photography online, is leading this trend.

This article introduces some of the initiatives we are working on to improve the speed and quality of the search experience for the customer and to help our contributors compete.

New search engine

We are preparing to release a new search engine in Q3 2007. The initial launch version will be a minor change compared to our existing system, but it has been built to be compatible with a new generation of products and tools from Alamy. These include a new keywording structure, future versions of AlamyRank, customer search activity reporting tools, greater speed, and stronger relevancy.

New keywording structure

AlamyRank introduced the concept of using views and clicks as a means of assigning a score to a group of images. The system assumes that if a collection of images is seldom clicked or sold in proportion to the number of times it has been seen by customers, it should carry less weight relative to a collection that has a stronger track record of clicks and sales.

“Manage images” screenshot showing new fields
Click to see large screenshot (131Kb)
Searchable fieldsThe introduction of AlamyRank means that contributors to Alamy want to be seen when appropriate to the customer and hidden when not. This presents a dilemma for the person keywording an image – should you enter all the words you can think of and risk being seen too often (and thereby reduce your ranking), or should you be more selective and concentrate on a small number of words that are most relevant to your image? The answer is a bit of both.

The new structure enables contributors to be comprehensive in their keywording without penalising their AlamyRank. This works like a pyramid, with the importance of the various keyword fields diminishing as the fields increase in size.

There are two objectives behind this project:

Improving relevancy

The pyramid approach to keywording enables contributors to be thorough in describing their images without damaging their AlamyRank. This will, in the long run, improve the relevancy of search results for customers.
Preparation for the commercial market

We need more information from contributors who are interested in selling their images into the commercial sector, especially on the question of model and property releases.

So as not to disadvantage contributors who keyworded their images under the old system, the new search engine will take into account whether an image was described under the old or the new keywording structure. Both the old and the new structures will be compatible with the new search engine. This system is scheduled for release in Q3 and will be optional for images already on the site.

Customer activity statistics

The next step towards improving the experience for customers is to share with contributors information about what is happening to their images in the search engine. The first version of a new tool, AlamyMeasures 1.0, will share customer search activity with our contributors.

AlamyMeasures screenshot
Click to see large screenshot (153Kb)AlamyMeasures 1.0 will show you how often your images have been viewed and clicked by customers, as well as how your images performed against the rest of the collection. From a summary page that will be available via My Alamy, you will be able to see specific search requests that returned your images. AlamyMeasures also links through to your images so that you can edit any keywords or phrases that are generating an excess of views relative to clicks.

Summary

The projects outlined above mark the start of an exciting time for our company. Giving finer control to our contributors over how their images are seen by the search engine will, in time, improve the quality and accuracy of the customer experience. Of equal importance to looking forward however, is not leaving those who already have images on Alamy behind. The changes you will see over the coming months are designed to open up new opportunities for all our contributors, new and existing, as our business develops.

Keep an eye on this blog for further announcements relating to the plans outlined above.

Do something...

James West - CEO — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 12:42:00 GMT

© David Hoffman Photo LibraryLike many others I have been thinking about how to reduce my domestic greenhouse gas emissions. Here are some of the things I have tried (in vague order of effort required). I’d be interested to hear your comments and any stories from your own experiences.

Get motivated

Admittedly I was already motivated before seeing former US Vice President Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, but it gave me a greater sense for both the need for immediate action as well as some grounds for optimism.

If you haven’t already seen the movie, then I have 45 copies to give away (region 2, pal format). Send us an email with your name and address if you would like to receive a DVD (first come first served). Please pass it on to someone else once you have finished with it.
Switch off electrical equipment when not in use

I turn off everything that can be turned off without causing major disruption! This includes mobile phone chargers (even without the phone plugged in they consume power) and any appliances that have a "standby" mode.
Replace filament light bulbs

I recently replaced all the filament bulbs in my house with low energy ones. Contrary to popular opinion, these lights have a much warmer light than they used to have (you know the ones - installed for ten minutes then removed and stuck in a cupboard somewhere). These new lights consume one fifth of the energy of the old lights without compromising on the quality of the light. I recommend that you try out a few types before you replace the lot as some are better than others.

My next goal is to replace all the 25 Watt halogen spotlights (every kitchen in the UK seems to use these energy-greedy little lights) with 3-5 Watt LED lamps. These are in the "nearly but not quite there" category, but I"m hopeful that the new warm white LED lamps I received recently will do the trick. I will keep you posted.
Change electricity supplier to a renewable energy one

I use Good Energy. It costs 11.19 pence GBP (21.9 cents USD approx.) per kilowatt hour. The cost is another incentive to reduce my electricity consumption.
Fly less

Last year I drove or took the train on holiday rather than flew whenever practical, but I still flew twice. This year I’m only flying for business.
Hassle employers and trade organisations to do more

OK, I’m the boss, so it’s easy for me to say this, but greenhouse gas reduction strategies now feature in the responsibilities of our department heads. It’s also a great marketing tool. Do it and your customers will reward you for it.
Modify vehicles

Last year I converted my VW diesel van to run on vegetable oil. The idea is that carbon dioxide absorbed during the plant growth is released back into the atmosphere during combustion. This means that the over the lifespan of the fuel crop (from growth to combustion), no additional greenhouse gases are produced.

Renewable energy transportation links:
- Overview of the biofuels debate (PDF)
- Tesla Motors
- Green Car Congress
- EV World
- SmartVeg
- Biodiesel - whacky, but lots of info.

Rambling CEO

Novel Use announcement

Launch of Limited Use – the first of our Novel Use initiatives

Blogs

Social Networking

Education

AlamyMeasures (beta) - follow up note 1

AlamyMeasures (beta) is live!

10 Million pictures on Alamy!

Novel Use Scheme – money from unusual places...

Pricing - the Alamy way

Keywording for the future

Synopsis

New search engine

New keywording structure

Improving relevancy

Preparation for the commercial market

Customer activity statistics

Summary

Do something...

Get motivated

Switch off electrical equipment when not in use

Replace filament light bulbs

Change electricity supplier to a renewable energy one

Fly less

Hassle employers and trade organisations to do more

Modify vehicles