February Sales Updates:

Sold at Picfair: Anti National Front demonstration in Brixton

A stronger month in February with a lot going on in the Microstock world.

Shutterstock took first place as ever with one of their best performances in months. A good number of On Demand sales and a few modest Single Downloads helped boost things here. Their new redesigned Contributor Dashboard has gone down well with me (though not everyone) and I am especially enjoying seeing exactly where in the world my downloads have taken place

Second place went to Dreamstime with 6 downloads. Two higher value credit sales pushed up the earning here.

In third place were Picfair with (at last) my third sale there. My seventies image of protests at a National Front march in Brixton finding a buyer at well above micro prices. A nice touch at Picfair is that you can request payout as soon as you have a sale which is what I did. For some reason I opted for payment via Paypal (rather than direct to my bank). Be aware that this will carry a fee at Paypal -I forgot that the main agencies pay the fees for you. A lesson learnt for next time.

Fourth place was taken by print site Redbubble with two merchandise sales. Things seem to have slowed recently here but nothing like Fine Art America where it is now some fourteen months since my last sale. Not sure what happened to them but I have, in any case, paid my premium account fee for another year in the hope that things pick up.

Church of Christ The Saviour, Tilos island

Fifth place went to Istock with 16 downloads. February 20 saw the first of their new monthly sales reports. Unless you upload the report into some spreadsheet software you are going to have a hard time deciphering what has sold and for how much. Why they can't just give you a straight forward list of sales and commission I don't know. There's talk of improvements to come so I hope this will be one of them. The big question around the new % based subscription commissions was partially answered, Yes there some paltry $0.02 commissions but also many well above the old fixed 28c per download. I'll have to see how that pans out in the coming months before making decisions on continuing to work with Istock.

Bigstock were in sixth place with 17 downloads. A strong surge of Greek island images here this month.

123rf made seventh place with a poor 5 downloads. There seems to be no consistency with them at all recently.

Dodekanisos Express catamaran powers into Tilos island

Lastly, in at eighth place were Fotolia with 3 downloads. Bring on the editorial is what I would say to them!

Over at Alamy, still no sales as yet but exciting times as their impressive new Image Manager finally reached me (they have been rolling it out across contributors for a while now). Easy to upload and bulk edit it is a pleasure to use and, of course, the new Manager finally allows for editorial images to be set as Royalty Free (RF). For me, this means that I can now upload all the editorial images I have on Microstock (e.g. most of my portfolio). I also applied for and was granted access to the archive/historic uploads so I can also upload all my old celeb/political images. Best of all, these do not have to be approved - just upload and they're in. My portfolio has jumped from under 100 images to over 700 since getting the new Manager - with quite a bit of interest (in terms of views and zooms) from buyers. Feels like Alamy will now finally come good for me going forward.

Recent uploading saw me working on more images of the Greek island of Tilos including the Church of Christ the Saviour in Mikro Chorio and the Dodekanisos Express ferry arriving at Livadia. March has started slowly so far so I'll see what the rest of the month brings. Regards, David.