July Sales Updates:

Margaret Thatcher - now at Alamy

A slowish month as expected in July as the usual Summer Slowdown continues. However, one agency did buck the trend to leap to number one position ahead of Shutterstock (probaly the only time I can remember SS not being at the top).

So, in first place we have Alamy with 3 downloads. One smallish amount, one good double figure amount and finally one mega sale netting me not far short of $100. This was for an archive image of British/Danish broadcaster Sandi Toksvig. British television viewers will know that Sandi is one of the new presenters of The Great British Bake Off which returns to screen shortly - presumably prompting this sale. The other two sales were both of the Greek island of Tilos, so nice to see some diversity of sales going on here.

In second place, of course, were Shutterstock with a slow month in terms of downloads. Only the fact that over 50% of the total income was for On Demand downloads brought the value up. No doubt they will be back to their top place next month.

Phil Lynott - now at Alamy

Istock continued doing well in third place with 53 downloads. Many of my subscription downloads are netting well over the old fixed 28cent flat rate and far outweigh the few that received a pittance rate. Others over on the Microstockgroup forum are also reporting increased sales at Istock.

In fourth place were Dreamstime with 5 downloads. A credit sale netting over $10 pushed them up the rankings this month (more like that please!).

Fifth place was taken by Bigstock with 9 downloads. My images of the first ever Food and Drink Festival in
Tenterden, Kent seem to be doing well here with a number of sales.

Redbubble took sixth place with one good product sale.

Seventh place went to Mostphotos with 2 modest subscription sales.

Finally Canstock came in in eighth place with 1 small download.

Poll Tax Riots - now at Alamy

Sadly nothing at all in July from Fotolia.

Uploading in July saw me, again, concentrating on uploading my portfolio to Alamy. This has been a twin track operation with me uploading regular batches of digital images and awaiting QC (Quality Control) passes before uploading the next batch. At the same time I have been working through my (mainly B/W) archive image scans from the 1980s-1990s. As I have written before you have to be approved for this archival route by submitting link/s to your archive images online somewhere. The great thing is that once given the OK your uploads bypass the QC process and are ready to put on sale as soon as the uploads are processed at Alamys end (usually within an hour or so).  The upshot of this is that I have pretty much had a continuing flow of new images ready to put on sale taking my portfolio now to around 1700 and rising. Not bad considering I had less than a hundred images back in February before they allowed Royalty Free Editorial images. This months post is illustrated by some of those archive images. More updates in September! Regards, David.

April sales updates:

April saw another strong month at Shutterstock with 96 downloads ($52.51) and, as usual, a good number of On Demand sales.

Istock pleased with 11 downloads ($16.54) and three PP sales ($0.84). Editorial images were well to the fore here including two downloads of RAF display team The Red Arrows (pictured). The airshow season is approaching here so I expect to see more sales on Red Arrows images in the coming weeks. Also pleased to see that they are scheduled to do a display here in Hastings on July 22nd - the first time in twenty four years they have been here.

123RF produced 16 downloads ($8.24) , again mainly from my editorial images.

Dreamstime managed 6 downloads ($7.67) -a slow month for them.

A dissapointing single sale at Bigstock produced $0.50 (jumping ahead, May has started off much better for them).

Yaymicro saw one editorial sale (0.75 euros). I had hoped to see a jump in sales at Yay as they signed up with a number of new partner sites. Sadly, for various reasons, they are not currently including editorial images in these arrangements - thus excluding most of my portfolio. They tell me that this might change in the future.

Finally, Mostphotos produced one subscription sale (0.20 euros).

Uploading in April saw a continued push on my archive political images with a near 100% acceptance rate bringing my portfolio numbers up substantially.

Regards, David.

Bridge to Bigstock -Crossed:

Unlike some top flight contributors I didn't receive a Christmas card from Shutterstock or Bigstock this year (unless it is still in the post) but I did receive an excellent Christmas present, literally on Christmas Day, when I had an email from Bigstock confirming that they had transferred my images over from Shutterstock under the Bridge to Bigstock program.

Over 300 images were added taking my Bigstock port to some 1066. As previously posted, most of these were my B/W archive celebrity/politician images which do well on Shutterstock but were originally rejected at Bigstock for being grainy.

The transfer didn't work 100% perfectly as there are still some images missing on Bigstock (which I estimate at around 109 in number). My understanding is that this was mainly a manual rather than fully automated process so I guess there was scope for error on such a large number. Going forward, I'll try and identify the missing images and re-upload directly to Bigstock to fully complete my portfolio there.

Bigstock have been pulling in increased sales of late and this transfer can only help boost that. For the future, the other benefit gained is that all new acceptances at Shutterstock automatically appear in my Bigstock portfolio as well -thus saving uploading time. I have already put this to the test and all worked as it should. Sadly, there isn't a "Shuttle to Shutterstock" option as there are a number of images in my Bigstock port which got rejected at the parent site.

It will be interesting to see how my sales go at Bigstock in 2012. On that note, I'll wish everyone a happy and great selling New Year. Kind regards, David.