Alamy Sounds Alarm Over Newspaper Spending

James West, the CEO of U.K.-based stock photo agency Alamy, says U.K. newspapers are spending 30 to 70 percent less on stock photography this quarter year-over-year. In an e-mail to contributors (also posted on the Alamy blog), West identifies a series of problems at newpapers:

• 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

Read more here. This will come as no shock to anyone who's paying attention to the media industry.

West writes that to retain these newspaper customers, "any subscription offering needs to be priced at or below the total expenditure for the previous year for an unlimited number of downloads."

We don't know what portion of Alamy's sales come from U.K. newspapers, but this underscores a serious problem for photographers and stock agencies. How do you grow when your customers are going broke?

Comments

[Wisit Rujira]

This news comes at the same time as Alamy are a) devising a "commercial collection" and b) opening an office in the US. After their failed attempt (with contributors) at their "novel use" scheme one would have to assume that in spite of the recent reported sales drop amongst UK newspapers, this may have already been part of their overall future strategy.

It seems to be inevitable now, in stock, that to compete and remain in business that volume and market share are key. We could be looking at the end of the road for many mid size outfits this year who simply don't have the market share to survive with lower unit prices.

[Peter]

The Alamy Subscription idea is only being considered because Getty and other big agencies are continuously undermining the market by these offerings which are against the wishes of many of their photographers. At least Alamy has the decency to ask its contributors how they feel about these schemes and give the photographers the option to Opt-Out.

It is still a bad idea, as all of the BAPLA agencies would tell you, as it will put all the small agencies out of business. If. as photographers who earn their living from photography, we all refuse to allow images to be sold in subscription schemes, then the newspapers will just have less choice of good images, and eventually will have to go and negotiate a rate with the agencies that have the better images on their websites.

Maybe nobody cares anymore, but the premium newspapers know that good photography = better sales.

[Frank Evers]

"How do you grow when your customers are going broke?" - Easy, do what Getty does and was actually stated policy in their annual reports (when they used to issued them)....that is, pay the photographer's less per sale.

With the decline of the Newspaper, expect the large stock image houses to apply even more pressure on photographer splits to maintain revenues or "grow" their business.