February Sales Updates:

Santa Eulalia merchant schooner in Barcelona

February saw some improvements over the dismal January I am pleased to say.

Back on form in first place were Shutterstock with much improved sales and the return of a good number of On Demand downloads. Several modest Single sales also added to the results here.

Second place went to Istock with 25 downloads with my Tentertainment music festival images continuing to do well.

Redbubble came in third place with 3 product sales. I continue to be impressed with this site and always look forward to seeing what products from my range are purchased. Sadly, as yet, no one has bought a calendar -which I had expected to do well.

Fourth place went to Bigstock with 7 downloads -a mix of local images and Greek islands.

Vintage tram at Port Soller in Majorca

Dreamstime made fifth place with 5 downloads (all subscription sales).

123rf were in sixth place with just 4 downloads. To be fair, as well as stopping new uploads to them I

also opted out of their Partner sales so this is bound to have a downward effect. I am just waiting their promised "good news" announcement at the end of March before probably pulling the plug on them entirely.

Bringing up the rear were Mostphotos with just 1 download (a subscription sale for just a few euro cents). Some people, I gather, do quite well here but it has never really taken off for me. The ability to download your own images for free makes them useful as an additional back up for my files.

Nothing from Alamy in February but I continued to upload my back catalogue to them and now have around 2200 images there. I am hoping that because all my images are available with a Royalty Free license (they have to be because they are RF on other sites) I'll have a bit of an edge there. Carrying out test searches on my image subjects often throws up a lot of competition -until you exclude Rights Managed images from the results and a lot of the competition vanishes.

Zea marina at Piraeus in Athens

Nothing from Picfair either but I did make a major move by increasing the price of all my images from £10 to £40 (making them just under £50 when Picfair add their margin on top). Crazy move when a lot of photographers are only charging a pound or two? Maybe, but now I'm selling on Alamy the Picfair price just looked too cheap for what (I perceive) is a similar market. I also factored in that Picfair is now representing the long established Robert Harding (travel) picture library (prices well above mine!) and even the mobile phone images division of Alamy -Stockimo. If both those think they can get sales at premium prices then I didn't want to be selling myself short. Picfairs global price changer makes it easy to amend all your prices at any time in moments so I can always rethink my strategy at any time.

Recent uploading had me working through my various trips from last year including those from  Athens, Barcelona and Majorca. This year I am returning for an extended stay in Barcelona and going to the Greek island of Tilos -so I'm busy doing research to get stock image ideas ready. I'll report back on those later in the year. Regards, David.