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| Wing Walkers - soaring sales on Bigstock |
First place went to Alamy with 4 downloads. Three from my B/W archives and a Lidl supermarket exterior. Alamy also caused some reaction when they announced forthcoming contract changes. Chief among these was the dropping of the 50% royalty rate for exclusive images down to 40% (which non exclusive such as myself have been on for some time now). Cue a furore in the forums with a thread now running to 105 pages. According to Alamy only around 6% of their image database is exclusive anyway so I don't expect any reversal of that one. New is that anyone not generating $250.00 a year (in gross licensing fees -not in royalties earned) will drop to a new rate of 20% but not until after a year of sales up to July 2022. New contributors will start on 40% and have a year to clock up some sales. I do not expect this to affect me but anyone with a very small portfolio or not very in demand images have cause to worry. Further concerns were raised around changes to the contract wording emphasising that photographers take legal responsibility for the images they upload. This, in reality, was nothing new and I have always assumed this was the case with all agencies. A number of risk adverse contributors have given in their notice at Alamy rather than agree to the new contract - I'll be sorry to see some of them no longer posting in the forum there.
Redbubble took second place with 7 product sales ranging from T shirts to mugs to greeting cards.
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| Catkins - close to hand |
Third place went to Shutterstock. Biggest factor here was the almost total lack of On Demand and Single sales which are crucial to rack up the income.
Fourth place was taken by Istock with 26 downloads. A low RPD pulled them down here. On the plus side it was good to see music festival and travel images selling - a sure sign that some degree of normality is starting to return.
Fifth place was interesting as Bigstock had 17 downloads - all of the Breitling Wing Walking team. This was a smaller scale reprise of the Red Arrows event in April. Day after day somebody downloaded a few more images until they had the lot (sadly I have a much smaller number of images than of the Arrows!).
Adobe made sixth place with 7 downloads including two from my Illustrative Editorial uploads (Tesco shopping trolleys and newsagent WH Smith). Looking forward to getting more of these uploaded going forward.
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| WH Smith - Editorial sale at Adobe |
Seventh place went to Dreamstime with 7 downloads. Interesting that four of these were also of the Wing Walkers which left me wondering if this was the same buyer.
New uploads included some of a John Lewis department store (which, sadly, was permanently closed this year) and some Silver Birch tree catkins which involved the great effort of opening my kitchen window and sticking my camera out :)
Real travel photography is still on the horizon as I now am fully vaccinated and good to go medically. I just need the UK Government to start green lighting more countries. I mean, I am sure the Falkland islands are very interesting but are not exactly a short hop on EasyJet. Portugal was a blow as I had already started researching that when they bounced it back to amber status after just a few short weeks as green.
Lets keep hoping for July. Regards, David.
