Alamy's Q2 Figures . . .

Stock Asylum Staff Report
July 17, 2007


New quarterly figures release by Alamy on this date appear to show a continuation of three recent trends at the British stock photography distributor.

The numbers for the second quarter indicate that the percentage of revenue from rights-managed sales is rising when compared to royalty-free sales, the percentage of revenue from editorial sales is growing in comparison to commercial sales and the percentage of revenue from images supplied by individual photographers continues to increase when compared to sales of images supplied by stock distributors.

However, Alamy does not report the actual revenue figures in any category, so it is not clear if royalty-free sales, commercial sales or sales from distributor collections are actually down in terms of dollars.

Alamy CEO James West recently said the company is growing at an annual double-digit percentage rate. Depending on the exact growth figure, any or all of the three lagging categories could be experiencing revenue growth while losing the percentage battle.

Alamy said revenue from royalty-free sales dropped to 31 percent of all sales during the second quarter of this year. This was three percent below the previous quarter and 16 percent below the first half of 2004, which was the first period for which Alamy reported figures.

The company said that 77 percent of second quarter revenue came from editorial sales while just 23 percent came from commercial sales. During the previous quarter, 73 percent of revenue came from editorial customers. During the first half of 2004 the split had been 60-40 in favor of editorial.

As a group, individual photographers captured 53 percent of all revenue during the most recent quarter with distributors responsible for the remaining 47 percent. During the first quarter of this year, photographers accounted for 51 percent of Alamy sales revenue. It was the first time that photographers led distributors in total revenue. During the first half of 2004, photographers as a group accounted for just 33 percent of Alamy revenue with the remaining 67 percent going to distributors.

Overall pricing of imagery remained almost constant. On average, rights-managed images licensed for $155, which was the same as the previous quarter. An average royalty-free image licensed for $220 during the second quarter, a drop of $2 from the previous quarter.

The average price of a rights-managed image for commercial use dropped $18 to $360 during the second quarter while the average price of a rights-managed editorial image rose $3 to $133.

The collection continued to grow rapidly as individual photographers added 377,620 rights-managed images and 88,183 royalty-free images during the second quarter. Distributors added 166,966 rights-managed images and 264,508 royalty-free images. As of this date, Alamy said it has 9.15 million images in its online collection. A total of 2,908 photographers submitted imagery during the second quarter of this year while 178 distributors submitted work.

The Alamy web site is at: http://www.alamy.com.

For a PDF of all the Alamy figures, click here .