Alamy To Offer Low-Priced Web/Education Images

Alamy, the big U.K.-based stock image library, is planning to launch a new pricing structure that will let bloggers, educators and amateur Web users buy image licenses at low prices.

How low? Try £0.60, or about $1.18.

CEO James West explains the scheme on the Alamy contributors blog: "Limited Use has been devised to let your images compete in the low cost ‘micropayment’ market without undermining your existing revenue streams on Alamy."

To start, the service will only be available in the U.K. It will feature only images from contributors who have made their work available through Alamy's new "Novel Use Scheme," which gives Alamy the freedom to license images at reduced prices but also offers contributors a higher commission.

Whether this service succeeds will depend on (a) whether the collection competes in depth and quality with microstock sites like iStockphoto and (b) marketing, given Alamy's limited name recognition outside of the professional community.

I also question the idea of offering reduced prices to blogs but not corporate or promotional Web sites. The line between the two keeps growing fuzzier. (Is AOL News a blog? How about PDNPulse?)

Comments

[Peter Phipp]

If you are able to read the comments on the Alamy blog many many photographers are completely against this idea and wish that Alamy would scrap its introduction now. This Microstock idea is for selling amateur's images for next to nothing and is ruining the whole industry. The agencies that have gone down this road offering microstock are just trying to bolster the turnover before they sell the company on to a load of investors who possibly dont really understand what is going to happen. The number of customers is irrelavent if they are all paying virtually nothing . Why are these big established agencies pushing this stupid microstock thing?

[Michael]

"bloggers, educators and amateur Web users"

Uhm... and the process for verifying the purchaser is what?