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

January Updates:

After the Christmas slowdown, the new year got off to a flying start. Best month ever on Shutterstock with 72 downloads ($22.94) and a BDE of 14 downloads. Meanwhile, another milestone as my SS portfolio passed 700 images.

Over at Dreamstime I had 13 downloads ($9.64) bringing my total sales there to 52 since joining.

Bigstockphoto continued its flurry of sales with a further 5 downloads (most of which were my archive politician images -the General Election is coming soon in the UK so I am expecting my political images to show an increase in sales).

Istockphoto brought 4 downloads ($3.10) of which two were my first sales on "Partner Programme" site Photos.com.

And Yay! Finally had another sale at Yaymicro (o.5 Euros). Well it all helps! What was pleasing was that it was one of my Editorial images (Poll Tax riots in London). So hopefully my Editorial there is starting to get some attention.

Nothing yet from Mostphoto, but I've only uploaded 23 images to them so far so no surpise there. British site Picturenation also zero but they have only been back online for a couple of weeks. However, lots of new images accepted on PN with some lightning quick reviews (including my fastest ever approval -about 30 seconds after submission! They were obviously reviewing my batch as I was adding captions and submitting. It started to feel like a bit of a race at one point).

Meanwhile at 123RF my trial Editorial submission got reviewed and all were accepted (11). There was a delay there as I wasn't previously signed up to them. Turned out that they were not set up for people joining with just Editorial images. One of their people was posting on the Microstockgroup.com forum so I queried why mine were still waiting approval. Pleased to say that they dealt with it within a day or so. Looking forward to uploading a load more ahead of their forthcoming Editorial launch. Regards, David.

Picturenation:

Delighted to report that British site http://www.picturenation.co.uk has finally made it back online today! I've already made my first upload and everything seems to be working fine. My images and commission are all still showing correctly as well. A lot of people were quick to write off this site when they first went offline, but I always remained confident that they would return. Now I have several months worth of images to get uploading. Regards, David