My Alamy experience - part the seventh
For the first time since I started this series of Alamy experience posts I'm not optimistic. Yes, sales and revenue are holding up but recent changes to the Alamy contributor contract has made me doubt my future at the agency.
First the good part. Sales continue to come in - 3354 to date - and gross revenue has now risen to $61,639. My portfolio now contains 11,793 images and I continue to expand it. However, there has been a definite downward trend over the last three years, exemplified by these sales and revenue graphs.
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| Total sales by year |
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| Total revenue by year |
Still respectable but the trends are definitely downward. Obviously we're only a little over halfway through 2026 so the final data points reflect this. If things continue I should at least equal last year's figures.
If.
Now the bad parts - and that's where the if comes in. Here starteth the rant.
Firstly, Alamy operate a tiered commission rate. This has operated such that any contributor with a gross sales figure of over $250 per year is automatically in their Gold 40% to the contributor commission tier. Easy enough to achieve. But they've now issued a new contract and the significant provision is that the threshold from 1 September 2026 for the Gold 40% commission tier is now to be $3000, a 12x increase. It is also based on cleared balances only for the previous 1 September 2025 to 31 August 2026. Don't achieve that and you go down to Silver and receive only a 20% commission rate. To say that this has caused a great deal of anger and soul searching on the Alamy contributor forum is to understate the situation.
Secondly, Alamy also introduced a new, AI driven, Smart search facility late last year. It's a pile of stinking ordure. It throws up spurious and irrelevant search results based on AI hallucinations of what is germane to the customer's needs. The result has been massive falls in reported sales, views and zooms by many contributors. There is anecdotal evidence that customers are abandoning Alamy because they can't find what they want. Why this was ever foisted on a live system God alone knows. In my previous working life if I'd tried to do something like this I'd have been summarily fired. Yet Alamy claims it's working as planned. Delusion or design?
Was the plan to make it hard for many contributors to achieve Gold level commissions by both raising the threshold and artificially reducing their exposure to potential buyers in the remaining weeks before the new contract kicks in. If so it's working. My own sales have crashed over the last two months and many others are reporting exactly the same over an even longer period.
I'm currently in Gold. My figures are such that I'll stay in Gold from 1 September. But if the sales crash continues I could find myself out of Gold for the following year. And that presents a problem.
It's not viable for me to continue contributing images to Alamy at a 20% commission rate. I'm not covering my equipment, travel, Lightroom / Photo shop subscription etc costs let alone making a small profit. Yes, photography at the interface between horticulture and ecology is both my hobby and main source of stock images. I'll continue doing it for personal pleasure, to generate imagery for The Garden House, and to illustrate my own writing. But I won't be short changed by a short sighted stock agency whose actions will very likely drive away specialist contributors like myself. Contributors whose lack of volume is surely outweighed by the diversity of unique images they contribute.
Here endeth the rant.
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