Getty Images’ royalty-free brands are being removed from Alamy after the two companies were unable to agree on renewal terms of their distribution contract.
According to Alamy CEO James West, the Digital Vision, Photodisc and Stockbyte collections have already been removed, and the Jupiterimages collection will be taken down later this week. After all these images are removed, Alamy will still have more than 4 million royalty-free images and over 16 million total images on its site.
West said: “Sales from the Getty collections make up only a small percentage of our total revenues and represent a smaller percentage of total revenues than they do of the total number of images on Alamy.”
A couple weeks ago, Alamy had over 17 million images on its site; today it has 16.43 million. This probably means that somewhere in the range of 3% to 4% of Alamy’s total annual revenue—in the neighborhood of $1 million—came from Getty brands.
Other royalty-free brands still represented by Alamy stand a good chance of benefiting from this move. Obviously, Getty hopes that the Alamy customers who had previously purchased Digital Vision, Photodisc, Stockbyte and Jupiterimages content will now turn to gettyimages.com.
However, this could easily backfire. Most of Alamy’s customers probably already know that Getty exists, but still, for one reason or another, choosen to go to Alamy instead. My guess is that these customers will continue to use Alamy, and most will settle for the best image they can find there, rather than specifically seeking one of the four Getty brands. As such, much of the Alamy revenue previously generated by these brands seems likely to go to purchase images from other brands available on the site.