February Sales Updates:

Margaret Thatcher - Shutterstock E.D.

A pleasing strong month in February with a few nice surprises.

A powerful month on Shutterstock as it maintained its usual place at the top. On Demand sales were strong, producing more revenue than standard subs. An Enhanced Download (Extended License) of Margaret Thatcher helped boost things further. The controversial change to the ED payout (from flat $28 to a varied % amount based on your sales tier) didn't make a lot of difference here. Under $3 less than previously -certainly not enough to make me consider opting out of these sales as some have done.

Istock took a decisive second place with a worthwhile 10 credit sales and a further 27 sub/PP downloads. This was one of the strongest months for credit sales in a long time.

In third place came Dreamstime who, as previously posted, had a record sales day for me with 54 subscription sales of my archive rock band images. A further 10 subscription sales during the month helped reverse the poor showing for DT of late. It was interesting to see the flurry of unrelated downloads after having that big day. It may be that my images got pushed up in the search rankings because of that. Or just a co-incidence :) If you are on Dreamstime never miss the chance to post good news using the sites Blog facility. New blogs get listed on DT front page and can help to draw a lot of attention to your portfolio. Also, do not forget to make use of the social media sharing buttons on your blog posts to draw in Twitter, Facebook and Google+ readers. To date my post has had over 1600 viewings and gained a place in the "hot" topics listing -again bringing in more attention to my work. DT also rewards popular/useful posts with a free credit which can be put towards image purchases there. Several of the images on my Greek Islands blog have been obtained in this way.

Vintage car - Laptop sleeve sale on Redbubble

Fourth place went to Redbubble who pleased with a further two product sales. Margaret Thatcher on a baby outfit (lucky baby!) and my vintage American car image on a laptop sleeve. It's taken a while, but my images seem to be gaining some traction at Redbubble of late. My only disappointment so far is not selling any of my range of calendars. I had felt sure that Christmas would have seen a few sales of these.

123RF took fifth place with 14 downloads. Editorial images making a strong showing here. It's a shame then that, once again, I have a backlog of over twenty editorial images awaiting review -some for weeks now. Seems I keep going down the same road of waiting forever for reviews and then having to email support to get something to happen (sigh).

Lech Walesa - multiple sales in February

Bigstock made sixth place with 7 downloads. Steady tick over site this. Never really excites or surprises and I have never had an extended license there in all the years I have been with them. Maybe one day?

Finally in seventh place were Fotolia with just a single download. I am prepared to be patient with this one as I still only have a small portfolio and there is everything to play for in the future -especially with all images being mirrored on Adobe Stock and available directly within Photoshop. They just need to start taking Editorial images and I'll be really happy.

Images used this time show the Enhanced sale on Margaret Thatcher at SS and the vintage American car sold at Redbubble. Lech Walesa, former President of Poland, makes an appearance after a flurry of sales on Shutterstock, Dreamstime, Bigstock and 123rf. A good example of how archive images can sell when the subject is in the current news. Regards, David.

How to add a Slideshow to your blog on Blogger.Com:

EDIT: DUE TO CHANGES AT GOOGLE THIS FEATURE NO LONGER WORKS. I AM TRYING TO FIND A WAY TO REPLACE IT.
Sharp eyed readers will have noticed a new feature on this site. A slideshow at the top right featuring a random sequence of images that I have posted on here over the years. You could, of course, just scroll through multiple pages of posts to see the images -but how much more simple is it to just have them displayed in one place? Hover over the bottom of the Slideshow box and you will find control buttons to pause/resume the show and arrow buttons to manually move backwards or forwards -one image at a time.

So now you want one for your own blog, right? Well, it is really easy to do but required a lot of Googling about on my part to find the answer to the various questions as to how to get the thing to actually work :) This post will give you the information you should need -providing your blog is hosted on the Blogger.com platform. I'm sure other platforms have similar abilities but I cannot help with those.

For clarity -what I am aiming to do here is enable a slideshow of just images that I have published on this blog (there are other options to have a slideshow from your Flickr etc albums -but that is not covered here).

Start by clicking on Design on your Blogger dashboard then on Layout (on the left hand side). You will now have a template showing the various current elements of your blog -Blog Posts/About Me/Links etc. What you need is an unused box that says Add A Gadget. If there isn't one where you wish your slideshow to appear you can move an existing element to a different position by deleting then re-adding elsewhere or just using Drag and Drop to reposition an empty box (depends on the technology you are using).

You now have an empty Add A Gadget box in the correct position. Just click on the Add A Gadget words to get a pop up box showing all the various elements you can add. Scroll down and click on Slideshow by Blogger. Now the fun part. First give your Slideshow a title (just type into the top box). Next choose your image source for the Slideshow. The default one shown is Picasa Web Album. Great you will think -that's where the images on my blog are stored so that's perfect. Wrong -you will just get other peoples (public) images from across the whole of Picasa. That might actually suit some and you can fine tune it by choosing a keyword like Sunsets -so you will get a nice slideshow of other peoples Sunsets!

To get your own images use the drop down menu on Image Source and choose the Other option. A new box will appear saying Feed URL (essentially the internet address from where you want your images to come from). Here I tried putting in the web address of this blog -but that didn't work at all. What you need is the web address (URL) of the RSS feed of the appropriate Picasa album. Keeping up?

The easiest way (for me) was just to click on New Post and then the Add Image link. This gives you options to source an image by  either uploading or from your existing Picasa album. Choose the latter and then, in my case, the sub-album entitled ShootingStock. On the right you will see a link for the RSS feed for this album. Click this and the address you now see in the address bar at the top is the one you need to copy and paste for your slideshow source.

So, go back and paste this in the Feed URL box and you should start to see a preview of your slideshow appear at the bottom of the pop up box. Success! Now there are just two more boxes to complete. Choose a speed for your slideshow Slow/Medium/Fast and Randomise images (presumably if you do not tick the latter it will just display your images in the same sequence every time).

Finally (!) just click Save at the bottom of the pop up box and then Save Arrangement on your full Layout page. Now go to View Blog to start enjoying your new feature. One thing I did find was that it displayed perfectly on Google Chrome but on IE9 it just kept saying "loading" where my slideshow should be. Worse, my views counter had also vanished from view. More Googling later and I found the solution was to click the Compatability box in the address bar at the top (the little oblong box on the right with a zigzag line through it). Because IE9 is getting old as a system you just need to click this to make the slideshow work perfectly -and my views counter came back as well.

This probaly all sounds way more complicated than it actually is but with the steps listed above you could probaly have your slideshow added and running within a couple of minutes. Enjoy! Regards, David.

1000 downloads (with a bullet) on Dreamstime:

The Tom Robinson Band 

I have posted a number of times recently about slow sales at Dreamstime, so it's nice to redress the balance with a good news story from them.

For sometime I had been anticipating being able to post about reaching my 1000th download there. With around 950 downloads I had expected that this post would still be a while in coming. However, all that changed last Sunday (yes, a Sunday!) when I checked my sales figures to find some 54 new downloads all in one day. With a bullet indeed :) These were all subscription downloads, nethertheless it was great to see a daily sales report running across three pages!

Lene Lovich

What had sold (obviously to the same buyer) were virtually all my B/W archive images of British rock bands from 1978/1979. Back then I used to cover the music scene in London and would be out several times a week photographing both up and coming bands and hit artists like the Boomtown Rats, Thin Lizzy and the Tom Robinson Band.

It is really great to see these images being appreciated and downloaded some 38 years later. I'd love to know what project this buyer was working on but realise that I'll probaly never find out.

The Banned

It's worth noting that many of these images were Level 0 (no sales) and online for more than four years. Once these would have qualified for automatic deletion by Dreamstime so I am really glad that they changed their policy on that several years ago.

This supports my belief that stock images (especially Editorial) should always remain online.

 You just never know when a buyer may discover and download your images. Regards, David.

January sales updates:

Avro Vulcan XH588 -sadly flying no more

An interesting month in January with the holiday season still in full swing for the first part of it. The diversity between my best sites and the bottom ones seemed more pronounced than ever.

Shutterstock made first place as ever with earnings greatly exceeding my other agencies. A fair number of On Demand sales and a worthwhile Single download for nearly $20 kept my sales up here. The holiday effect led to no less than Seven zero sales days in January. What was also heartening here was a noticable increase in acceptance rate for my new uploads. At one point I was wondering if I was going to get any rejections at all -until I did :) A pleasant change from being told all my images are out of focus, wrong colour balance, poor lighting et al. It remains to be seen if this will last.

Second place was taken by Redbubble with two products sales. A framed print of cruise liner Norwegian Jade and a T Shirt featuring one of my Poll Tax Riots images. It looks like my images are starting to get some traction here (I already have more sales in February).

Hastings Pier - set to re-open in April 2016

Third place was taken by Istock with five credit sales and a further 19 sub/PP downloads. Editorial images continue to figure highly here.

Fotolia took fourth place with four downloads. Several of these paid larger than usual (for me) royalties which helped push them up my rankings here.

Fifth place went to Bigstock with eleven downloads. Several of my archive celeb images (Alan Alda, Leslie Nielsen etc) sold there.

Sixth place was taken by 123RF with eleven downloads -mainly subscription sales. Reviews continue to be an issue for them with many images just sitting in pending week after week. I do hope I am not going to have to email them yet again asking them to review my uploads. To add to the fun, 123 also had over a week in which their uploader failed to work. You could go through the usual process but at the end the files just weren't there. Waiting for them to turn up didn't work -they never did. At least that did get fixed in the end although it disrupted my workflow by having to backtrack to the missing images and re-uploading.

Halki island - the stunning view from my apartment in 2015

In a sad Seventh (and bottom) place were Dreamstime with just 4 downloads making under $3 in commission. I do not think there is anything I can do about Dreamstime other than keep uploading and hoping things improve there.

New uploads saw a variety of images including a set of the re-construction work on the Victorian pier here in Hastings (now scheduled to re-open in April). As work nears completion, this seemed a good time to get them out there. Other new images included my last photographs of Avro Vulcan bomber XH588 appearing at the Dunsfold airshow in 2014. Sadly, XH588 had her last flight in October 2015 and there are now no more flying Vulcans. I just feel priviliged to have seen this iconic aircraft in flight several times. Finally, I continued to upload images from my 2015 trip to the little Greek island of Halki. This utterly charming small island is right up there in my favourites list and I have now booked again for 2016. Hopefully, I'll still find something new to photograph when I make, what will be, my fourth visit there! Regards, David.

December Sales Updates:

Enhanced Download at SS: Bob Geldof with fans, 1978

Some interesting results for the final month of 2015 with several sites making an unexpected appearance.
Shutterstock was far from unexpected at first place in my monthly sales. A welcome Enhanced Download of my 1978 image of Bob Geldof (lead singer of Irish band The Boomtown Rats) started the month well on December 1.

Second place was taken by FineArtAmerica with two product sales. A T Shirt featuring my image of Kent band Coco and The Butterfields was followed up by a framed print sale of Phil Lynott (lead singer of Irish band Thin Lizzy). December was clearly the month for seventies Irish singers :)

Istock took third place with 3 credit sales and 28 subscription/partner program downloads.

Phil Lynott -framed print sale on FineArtAmerica

Some way behind in fourth place were 123rf with 8 downloads. These were mainly editorial -which seems to be doing well at 123 recently.

Fifth place went to Bigstock with 9 downloads. Pretty much all subscription sales as is the norm there for me.

Slumped down in sixth place were Dreamstime with just 5 downloads. This was my second WME
(worst month ever) since joining them in 2009. Only May 2015 produced lower earnings. To see what are normally smaller earners such as Bigstock and 123 overtake a major agency like Dreamstime is worrying indeed. I can only hope DT will turn around for me in the coming year.

Fotolia came in at seventh place with 3 downloads. Let's see what the Adobe effect an achieve here in 2016.

Eight place (I don't usually get this far!) was taken by Mostphotos with 2 downloads. I'm not sure if this site is ever going to gain any real traction for me -especially as sales seem mainly confined to the Scandinavian market. I continue uploading just in case.

Finally in Ninth place were Print On Demand site Redbubble who got me a greeting card sale of former Prime Minister Tony Blair. I thought I was pushing things with a 70% mark up for cards but the £0.59 I received for this suggested otherwise. I have since changed this to 200% on the grounds that if somebody really wants my image on a greeting card they will not bothered by price (within reason). I know that when I choose a Birthday card for someone my choice isn't based on how cheap it is but, rather, will they like it.

Coco and The Butterfields - T Shirt sale on FineArtAmerica

No sales in December from any of my other sites including Yaymicro which made a surprise announcement in the last few days. From today, the Yaymicro site itself will cease to sell images (remaining only as a conduit for contributors to upload and monitor their account). All future sales will be via their subscription site Yay Images which they started in 2013. My concern here is that none of my editorial images appear on that site. Circa 700 commercial images are there but my other 1700 editorial images are missing and not searchable. I have emailed Yay to try and find out what is happening to these going forward. Whilst I have chronicled here how my sales have declined at Yay I had always hoped something might turn around with them. If they are really junking 1700 images which took me time and money to upload I will be far from pleased. I will report back later on what they say.

As we start 2016, I wish all readers of this blog a happy and prosperous New Year. Regards, David.