October Sales Updates:

The Red arrows display over Hastings

A positive month in October with some good sales and the end of the long running 123rf saga.

Returning to form were Shutterstock in first place with a pleasing number of On demand sales (making up over 50% of my total income here).

Second place went to Alamy with 2 downloads and a welcome and unexpected DACS payment added to the total. What's DACS? Find out here www.dacs.org.uk but essentially it's a pool of money collected for secondary use of images (e.g. where a university photocopies a text book containing your image). This is then distributed to registered artists. In my case I was happy for Alamy to make this claim for me (they keep 50%) though some who know what they are doing make the claim directly. Worth noting that Alamy would have been #2 even without this payment.

Third place went to Istock with 50 downloads. The RPD (rate per download) was disappointing this month - dropping slightly below the old fixed $0.28 for subscription sales. That's a first as it has usually been substantially higher.

Fourth place was taken by Dreamstime with 29 downloads. Nothing like the huge surge of September

Rough seas at Cala San Vicente, Majorca

but, once again, there was a single buyer who scooped up twenty images of Majorca in one hit. Can't help but think this was the same buyer though - possibly a travel website of some kind. Ironically at the time of writing I have yet to have a single sale for November there!

Redbubble disappointed with just 2 product sales ( a sticker and a baby outfit) to give them fifth place.

Sixth place went to Bigstock with 8 downloads of a mixed bunch of images.

Finally Fotolia made seventh place with just a single subscription sale. Adobe (owners of Fotolia) have recently announced that the Fotolia site will close next year leaving just the Adobe Stock site running. A good time then to register at Adobe and "synch" your Fotolia account as from next February all uploading will be done through the Adobe portal. I'd been putting this off but, in fact, was much simpler than I imagined. That said, I'm continuing to upload via Fotolia while I can. For clarity all images uploaded to either are currently mirrored on both sites.

Llibertat Presos Politics march, Barcelona

So where is 123rf you may wonder? Gone. Consigned to history as far as I am concerned. Once I'd hit payout AND received my payment I set about manually deleting my 2300 images. Remove. Confirm. I did it in stages throughout the course of a single day before emailing them to close my account. I'm sure they would have deleted the images for me anyway but I didn't want to chance having my account closed and the images still there.  In fact, they responded promptly and gave me the correct legal terminology to use to close the account. This done I got confirmation of closure within a couple of hours. Rather sweetly they thanked me for my past contributions and wished me well for the future. At least we ended things on a nice note. They were once a good, fair paying site (they even had a contributors forum at one point). But then the credit sales dried up and they introduced varying commission levels which were never going to work well for a mainly editorial portfolio. Lifestyle and model type images may well be a whole different story.

Recent uploading saw a lot from my trip to Majorca last month including a day of rough seas at Cala San Vicente. I also uploaded a set of a Red Arrows display over the Hastings seafront in July (they were marking the 100th Birthday of the RAF). Backtracking, I also returned to my April images of Barcelona including more from the massive Llibertat Presos Politics (Free Political Prisoners) march.

Early results for November are mixed so far so I'll see how the second half of the month goes. Regards, David.