March Sales Updates:

Amber Rudd, constantly in the news

A late posting (again!) for my March stats. I have the excuse that I have just returned from a week in the vibrant Greek capital of Athens and everything has been on hold because of that.

In first place a strong performance from Shutterstock with a good crop of On Demand sales and four Single downloads -including a pleasing one for just under $20.

Istock were in second place with 21 downloads. Again their was a spread of earnings from paltry to well above the 28cents previously earned for subscription sales. A few more months and I should have some meaningful figures to go on to decide if Istock are worth continuing with. For clarity, these figures are for downloads from February-March. As they now only report sales once a month my Istock figures are going to lag behind my other real time figures. Not ideal but no way round that at present. ETA This Istock ranking has been revised upwards due to my looking at the wrong report initially (nothing if not confusing!).

Dreamstime were in third place with 8 downloads. Some credit sales helping to push up the total here.

The White Cats, seventies image still selling today

Fourth place went to 123rf with 12 downloads. Better than some months recently but still a poor return on over 2000 images.

Fifth place saw Redbubble have two merchandise sales -a sticker and a poster. There is certainly a slower
rate of sales than I was seeing a while back but good margins on the products make it worthwhile.

Bigstock took sixth place with 7 downloads - pretty much all subs.

At the bottom were Fotolia in eighth place with just one download. Still no news of them opening the doors to editorial images yet.

No sales on Alamy in March but I continued to heavily upload my back catalogue to them and, in fact, didn't upload to any other sites in March. I'm alternating batches of my regular (mainly travel) images with batches of my old archive politicians/celebrities. My portfolio there has grown rapidly from below 100 images in February to approaching 1400 images now. Trust me that's a lot of work and time invested but I believe it is worth it (or will be long term).  

Livadia onTilos island, selling well recently

Normally I would highlight some recent uploads but as there haven't been any (other than back catalogue to Alamy) I thought I'd pick out some recent good sellers. Livadia harbour on the Greek island of Tilos has been doing well recently across a number of sites. It's a very small island with not that many stock images available. Also doing well is the British Home Secretary Amber Rudd (my local Member of Parliament). With the forthcoming General Election I would expect sales of her to continue. Finally New Wave rock group The White Cats from back around 1978. Sales of them keep coming even though they never had any real commercial success. Whether they sell as pictures of the band specifically or as generic images of seventies bands I do not know but long may they continue. More on my Athens trip next month :) Regards, David.