Permalink18 March 2009 at 17:45 by James West - Alamy CEO
Posted under News, Rambling CEO
The following email has been sent to all contributors who have images with us and to newly registered contributors.
We have seen some dramatic declines with some of our newspaper customers this quarter, ranging from 30% to 70% down year on year. I would like to share some thoughts with you on how we can reverse this trend.
I have spent the past week visiting photo editors and managing editors at several of the major UK titles to get a better understanding of why this is happening and where they see their businesses going.
All of the people I met with made the following observations:
- Advertising revenues have fallen dramatically this quarter in most cases
- Print sales have been falling and will continue to do so
- Online versions of newspapers have yet to deliver a revenue stream comparable with that of print
- Most titles have been making redundancies in recent months
- Editorial budgets have been cut
- Further editorial cuts are anticipated
Newspapers are going through a painful transition period that is being exacerbated by the recession. Most of the main titles think they will survive, but it is not yet clear what the right commercial structure for them will be. The only thing that is certain is that difficult choices and further cost reductions lie ahead of them.
Alamy is the only large supplier of imagery not offering a subscription scheme to newspapers and we are being squeezed out of this market by offerings from our largest competitors. These deals are in addition to, and separate from, newswire subscriptions. In the past we have managed to keep away from these deals because we represent a lot of material that isn't available anywhere else. Unfortunately the recession is forcing a change in behaviour at the picture desks that leaves little opportunity for image providers who don't offer unlimited downloads for a fixed fee. To put this in context, our largest UK newspaper customer has ordered their picture desk to only download images from agencies they have subscription deals with.
To keep our newspaper revenues alive this year we will have to move quickly to regain the ground lost to our rivals. The good news is that it's not too late to act - most of our customers want us to succeed because they like the speed, simplicity, and choice on Alamy.
Broadly speaking any subscription offering needs to be priced at or below the total expenditure for the previous year for an unlimited number of downloads. Wherever possible we will allocate revenue to contributors based on usage, but in some cases we may have to divide up the revenue based on downloads. It is hard to judge in advance what impact this will have on the average price per image for this market. At one end of the scale prices will remain at or slightly below 2008 prices, whereas at the other end prices might fall by up to 50% or perhaps even more. My expectation is that we will see a mixture of both.
We face a stark choice – either we adapt to match the competition, or we accept that UK newspaper revenue will continue to decline sharply over 2009.
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