Alamy has reported that in the last eight weeks it has added a record 1.2 million images to its collection which now exceeds 22 million images. In January alone the collection grew by 620,000 images.
A year ago the company had in the range of 18 million images on its site. Over 20,000 photographers and 500 picture agencies have contributed images to the Alamy.com site.
In February 2010 Alamy reported gross 2009 sales of $22,864,000. This was down 27% from 2008. We suspect that gross revenue increased slightly in 2010.
During 2008 Alamy was providing a level of detail about its sales that enabled us to estimate that the company licensed rights to something less than 200,000 images during 2008. This was less than 1% of all the images in the collection. Prior to 2009, the number of images licensed on a quarterly basis had remained relatively stable for a couple years, despite the growing size of the collection. Recently Alan Capel, head of content at Alamy, said, “we are licensing more images than before (on an annual basis)” but he would not provide any indication of how many more.