November saw a slight drop in sales at Shutterstock. 49 downloads compared to 67 in October. However, thanks to three On Demand sales income remained virtually the same at $16 odd. Considering I have uploaded few new images to them recently I was quite happy with this. More importantly I hit my first payout at the end of the month and now have $82 on its way to me!
Over at Dreamstime (which I have been concentrating on) my portfolio has reached 547 images, netting 23 sales in November and an all time figure of 34 sales. This amounts to nearly $23 in earnings in just a few weeks (nearly as much as I have ever earned on Istock!). I have now started uploading my non editorial images with (as I expected) a lower acceptance rate than my editorial ones. All the same, I am getting plenty accepted and had my first non-ed sale this week (a landscape shot of Hastings beach).
One or two sales at Istock and Bigstockphoto and a pleasing 11 euros from the Yaymicro "third party sales" scheme (basically, selected images are going to a third party seller and contributors get a quarterly payout). Veer marketplace sales remain at just 1, though my portfolio there has now reached 98. Still getting lots of rejections there ("not quite Veer") and very few views.
Istocks "partner program" with Photos.com is now underway and first results/sales should be available on our Istock page at the end of December. They will normally be updated monthly but because it was mid November before the scheme launched they are merging November/December results. I'm pleased to say my images show up well in searches on Photos.com so I am optimistic about getting some sales there.
Meanwhile British site Picturenation.co.uk remains offline in mysterious circumstances (see earlier posting). Their last Twitter update was on November 1 "back next week". Well that didn't happen. On November 24 they updated the apology notice on their site, again saying they would be back up "next week". They have long weeks in Staffordshire it seems. Just don't know what to make of the situation but I am still keeping my fingers crossed for this site.
Finally, much fun to be had at http://microstockgroup.com/ this week, after they moved to a new server. Most of us have been bounced back and forth from the new server to the old one where founder Tyler Olson (Leaf) has set up a "graveyard chat" page. It's been like being in a parellel universe all week and quite weird. I expect Picturenation would be glad to just have one version of their site up, yet alone two. Regards, David.
