April sales updates:

As ever, Shutterstock stormed head in April -far outgunning all my other agents. And, as ever, I am not allowed to publish the detailed figures due to their Terms Of Service. That's always a shame as it would be good to demonstrate just how well this agency sells stock images. Still, if you haven't already,
sign up for yourself and find out!

Dreamstime produced 17 downloads ($8.29) but, sadly, a lot of subscription sales pulled down the earnings. The big news at Dreamstime was their change of policy towards older unsold images - I'll write a seperate post about that later.

Istock saw an improving 13 downloads ($10.83) and an excellent crop of 19 PP sales ($6.87) -an increase that I imagine is because my editorial images are now also for sale at Thinkstock. I am looking forward to further increases here combined with the new subscription offer at Istock itself. First results should be in at the end of May.

Bigstock continued its growth with 16 downloads ($7.32) with lots of the $0.38 subs sales. It's good to see the increasing number of sales here which do not seem to have harmed my sales at parent company Shutterstock. Obviously, should they drop the special $0.38 sub rate for Bridge to Bridgestock participants my opinion may well change as my sub rate will drop considerably.

123rf ticked over with 13 downloads ($6.07) -mainly $0.25 subs. Reviews of both editorial and commercial images continue to be prompt.

Over at Fotolia I had 5 downloads (2.40 credits). Fotolia continued to be on peoples minds because of the launch of their subsiduary agency Dollar Photo Club. Again, this will be the subject of a seperate post.

Recent uploads included the 24th Hastings Mini Run (held in conjunction with the Hastings Half Marathon race). I also covered the two big May Day events in Hastings. The traditional Jack In The Green festival, where images included Flora the Singleton Giant. Pageant or Dancing Giants are a centuries old tradition in Britain and are reputed to protect their home towns from danger. Flora caused me some problems when I accidently renamed her Clara and had to spend time re-editing my captions!
The other big event was the annual May Day bikers rally which takes place on the seafront. This has been going for many years but just keeps growing in size. This year was certaily the busiest I've seen with an estimated 30,000 + motorcycles arriving in town and it is now said to be one of the biggest motorcycle events in Britain. I spent a lot more time photographing it this year -with a number of images already uploaded and accepted.  It certainly made a change of pace going from Morris dancers and Giants to all that horsepower on display. Regards, David.