Alamy, the UK-based image portal, recently announced to offer more than one million images from over 175 agencies and 2.500 photographers around the world. According to Alamy this represents a 330% growth in content since last year.
Alamy plans to open an office in the US this month (April 2004). Interesting for photographers: 92% of all Alamy customers are using Royalty Free images.
Alamy has added the following RF providers to its collection: Imageshop Zefa (UK); Bananastock (UK); Epcot Images (UK); Organics (UK); Goodshoot (France); Dex Images (Japan); Pixland (France); Inmagine (Asian); Medioimages (Hispanic); Comstock (US) and Thinkstock (US).
Looking at the beginnings of Alamy (we noticed them in December 1999) it is obvious that only the combination of acting like an agency for photographers and acting like a portal/agency carrier for the meanwhile great number of participating agencies could Alamy help to stay alive in the past. It would be interesting to learn which party - the 2.500 photographers or the 175 agencies - are the main contributors to the revenues of Alamy. We estimate this could be - minimum - a 30/70 split.
However Alamy has an office in “Asia Pacific” (that´s India in this case). This could indicate that Alamy has received a third round of venture capital (see bottom lines). Although there are positive rumors regarding the revenues of Alamy (another source has a somehow accurate estimation which we can not disclose) we disbelieve that Alamy is able to finance the worldwide expansion to India and the US only by self-created revenues and without external financial support. Looking at the jobs Alamy offers in India (12 jobs at the time of writing, overall headcount in India said to be in the range of 30 people), it just sounds like the classical third-round financing for business expansion.
Alamy claims that “65% or 75% of the sale goes to the photographer, with no upfront costs”. This is however not the complete story. Photographers can participate choosing the so called “Red”, “Green” or “Blue” distribution scheme of their pictures. Depending on what model you choose, it can go down at the end to 45% (Alamy “Blue” model with all zones distribution). Alamy still charges a storage fee of 10c per image per month in the “Green” model. Meanwhile the old (and original) “Red” model - with image submission fees of 2$ per image per month -is not available anymore. Initially Alamy tried to keep only 10 percent of the revenues.
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