July Sales Report:

Amber Rudd - new Home Secretary 

An average Summer month in July with just a couple of surprises along the way.

First place, as ever,went to Shutterstock with a reasonable though not great month. A good smattering of On Demand sales and one modest (though welcome) Single download.

Racing up to second place were Redbubble with no less than six product sales. These ran the gamut of prints, stickers, iphone case, and my first drawstring bag. A variety of images appeared on these from cats to Greek islands to Thin Lizzy singer Phil Lynott. It was quite exciting to see the "You've made a sale" emails keep arriving throughout the month.

A pleasant surprise from Dreamstime who made it to third place with 6 downloads. Of note here were the return of high paid credit sales with two images netting over $6 each in commission. Been a while since I had seen any of those.

Phil Lynott - popular at Redbubble

Istock took fourth place with just 2 credit downloads and a weak 17 sub and PP downloads - in fact just one sale from Thinkstock. As I have said before, I assume Getty are steering Thinkstock customers towards the subs packages at Istock as the PP sales have steadily diminished.

Bigstock were in fifth place with 10 mainly sub downloads.

In sixth place were Canstockphoto with a rare sale for me.

In seventh and bottom place were 123rf with just 2 sub downloads all month. This was certainly the unpleasant surprise of July. No idea what happened there. June saw 18 downloads and the first few days of August have already produced 6 sales. July did see the introduction of a new contributor interface and I kept hoping my sales just weren't being reported promptly but this was, sadly, not the case. I can't remember the last time (if ever) that I have had such low sales at 123. The danger here is that when the last 12 months credits are calculated in the future my awful July could push me back down to the lower paying Level 1 commission.

Pigs head - large credit sale at Dreamstime

Nothing from Fotolia (or the rest) in July including my seventh month running with no sales on FineArtAmerica -disappointing to say the least (especially when rival Redbubble is doing well).

No new uploading in July as I spent two wonderful weeks on the little Greek island of Halki. This was the second year running I have been there so took less images than I normally would. However, a day trip to the nearby island of Tilos had me maximising my time there to get as many images as possible. In a lucky break, my visit coincided with the arrival of dozens of yachts taking part in the Rhodes Cup yacht race which made for some good images.

The changes in Government which took place while I was away saw my local Member of Parliament Amber Rudd promoted to the senior position of Home Secretary and I was able to see downloads of her racking up in my sales reports from all the agencies that take Editorial (123rf excluded of course). Regards, David.