And so it begins...

Having been busy all morning answering e-mails, printing out contact sheets and editing pics from a childrens' show, I skipped away from work for a few moments to see how Alamy was doing for me this morning. Like many editorial photographers I find ‘The web’s largest stock photo site’ an additional useful outlet for my editorial work.
As part of my perusals I often pop into Alamys’ ‘blog’, which is hardly a blog; rather a notice board on which the portal announces changes to its way of dealing with things etc. Blow me down, today, James West, the Chief Executive Officer, proudly announces the Launch of Limited Use – the first of our Novel Use initiatives.

It doesn’t matter that we all knew it was coming; its arrival still has a bowel-opening effect on a photographer like myself who is so dependent on stock sales to make a living.

I can even see the point of so-called ‘bloggers’ and students having a place where they can buy pictures to illustrate their ‘blogs’ and their homework that doesn’t cost them an arm and a leg. Absolutely, there are many dollar or micro-sites dotted around that can supply material of this kind, so why do Alamy see the need to dilute their own brand and go chasing after the fifty-cent market?

Ok so James isn’t going to confide in me – and why should he? Except of course that it is not just his own business that he is affecting. More to the point he is affecting mine. Now that is something I take very seriously. How do I convince my clients that it is worth paying me premium rates to do a job, when they can see one of the major agencies that represent my work prepared to give it away at prices that make it, (frankly), uneconomic to produce?

James and his Alamy team are astute businessmen. They can see the benefits of the micro model – well for the distributor at least. It doesn’t matter how much the product sells for, as with micro it is volume they are after and not price. Ok, it is more challenging to have to sell 100 images at £0.60 to make the same as a simple £60 sale (the lowest price that I would consider selling a single image for, but here is the clever part: As well as selling ones work for a fraction of what most professionals would consider acceptable, Alamy have changed their terms for this new ‘novel use’ palaver, oh yes. So instead of 65% of the take the photographer now only gets 50% of the much-reduced turnover.

For the best part of a year photographers have been asking Alamy to define novel use and Alamy has refused to do so. “Is it like Micro?” photographers have asked. No, no, no, the nice people at Alamy said. Well now we know.

How Alamy intend to police this new cost market they have entered into has yet to be revealed. I suspect doing nothing at all is likely to be the avenue they choose. From a photographers' point of view, in addition to the overall devaluing of the photographic image, can someone tell me how photographic work will be protected?

Once a picture is up on a blog, what is there to stop anyone who wants to download it? For their own personal use would be abuse enough, but what is stopping every Tom, Dick and Harry, every Jenny, Sue and Liz from nicking these pics and using them on their own blogs, or giving them to other people? Bloggers already assume that anything up in cyber space is fair game and up for grabs, but feeding this insanity by charging £0.60 for a download seems pointless.

Except of course for those making the actual sales and just skimming 50% off each one. Luverly jubberly.

And I haven’t even started on this so-called educational use yet...



© Pete Jenkins
www.petejenkins.co.uk
www.photographerspro.eu/pete_jenkins/