Paddle steamer in the storm by copyright luisa fumi.

De profundis

by

It takes so little to kill the last glimmer of hope… I complained to Alamy about their mass-few-¢-sale of this month, and in reply I got this :

Hi Luisa,
Thanks for your email. I can see that these sales are through our distribution scheme. Which you are opted in for.
Our Distribution scheme is optional and under the section of your account titled “Additional Revenue Option”. As the title suggests it’s an opportunity to earn additional revenue through territories that Alamy doesn’t quite reach with direct sales. Every year our Distribution scheme returns a sizable 15% of our total revenue and so we’d recommend being part of it.
You can only opt out or remove countries in April of every year; this is so we can give our distributors a consistent collection.

Kind regards,
Chantelle

(note: I opted out from their ‘Novel use’ option last April 1st)

Let’s brush off the tiny coat of perfunctory politeness and have a closer look at the gist:

  • So I’m “opted in for”: did I opt in or was I opted in? I don’t remember having checked a box “feel free to sell my images for a few pennies and give me a minute fraction of that”.
  • If their Distribution scheme returns “a sizable 15% of their total revenue”, how many millions of images should they sell on the ‘miserable’ market to make 2¢ for the distributor, 2¢ for themselves and 1¢ for me, and still have a decent income?
    The 22 images of mine they undersold this way got them a total of $1.55 and a mightily irritated contributor about to abandon ship. Perhaps the time has come to move the rampant yuppie who had the Great Idea to the cleaning team.
  • So nice that I can opt out of such an economical disaster in April of every year, indeed. It would be even nicer though to know what exactly one has to opt out of in order to prevent one’s images from being given away like confetti.

“Fair play” has many opposites, and nowadays keeping the rules where nobody sees them has become a very popular one.

There is little doubt left, they definitely are shutterstocking. It’s damn sad to see an agency that used to have fair play as their flagship sink this low 🙁