Going green for Spring:

It's getting warmer. The clocks have gone forward and the seagulls on my window ledge are preparing to nest. Yes, Spring is here at last in the UK (though there's a threat of snow next week!). To mark this I've gone for a slight visual change on this blog. Out goes the headache inducing Orange header and in comes a fresh Spring like green. Not quite the radical changes that Bigstock and 123RF made to their sites recently but I hope it gives it a bit of a refresh.
Any opinions welcome. Regards, David.

PictureNation sales

Since their return online I have been busy uploading my backlog of images and, of course, hoping for some sales. Pleased to report three Editorial sales in the last week. A Medium resolution of the ever reliable Margaret Thatcher (netting £4 commission) and two Small web resolution sales of La Toya Jackson and Mohamed Al Fayed (netting £0.40 each). Hopefully, this is a start to more regular sales here as PN push their marketing now that they are back. I have a lot of archive British politicians images online with them and I'm hoping the forthcoming General Election here will generate some sales as commentators look back to previous elections (as they tend to do). PN's new lower rates (which they brought in shortly before going offline) make them much more competitive with the Micro sites whilst still offering photographers a better than Micro commission. At 40% they pay £0.40/£4/£6 for small, medium & large res sales. They also now offer Extended Licences which pay £14/£20/£30 respectively. They also have a referral programme but (rather dissapointingly) only for referring buyers and not new contributors as most of the Micro sites offer. I'm hoping that they'll look at that in the future. Regards, David.

February Updates

The shorter month of February proved a touch dissapointing with a drop to 62 downloads on Shutterstock ($20.39) despite new uploads. This is still my first year on Shutterstock so I don't know if February is normally a slower month for everyone or it's just me. It was certainly worrying to see a number of zero sales days throughout the month. Barring the odd Sunday I had got used to seeing some sales each day.

Dreamstime continued nicely with 11 downloads ($10.24) and it was pleasing to see a mix of both Editorial and Commercial sales (and also that the majority were credit sales and not subscriptions).

Yaymicro produced another Editorial sale, Margaret Thatcher (1 euro). Bringing up the rear was the ever dissapointing (for me) Istockphoto (3 downloads netting just 74cents!). Not even any subscription sales from their Partner Program. Clearly my images are not a good fit with the type of buyers Istock have, as many photographers achieve huge numbers of sales there. I cling to the hope that one day they might start taking Editorial images, which seems to be the trend with other Micro sites.

Bigstockphoto, Picturenation, Veer and Mostphoto all a zero for me in February. 123RF have yet to launch their Editorial collection online so nothing there yet either.

Meanwhile, PictureNation have added a link to this blog on their site. They had looked at ShootingStock when I was in touch with them whilst their site was down. They felt it would be of interest to some of their members so asked if they could link. Any extra traffic through this is very welcome, though I certainly won't feel obliged to just say nice things about them! My Google Adscence earnings have jumped up a bit since this link went on -so it looks like it has helped. Regards, David