Back in the Seventies and Eighties I founded and ran several Fleet Street photo agencies specialising in stock images of celebrities from pop stars to politicians. These were syndicated to the National and International press and Television. These days I am active in the Microstock world and this blog charts my journey as well as, hopefully, providing inspiration and ideas to others. Image buyers should also find this blog useful with links to my portfolios and regular updates on new uploads. Unless otherwise stated all images are my copyright and may not be reproduced or copied. Comments are very welcome but will be reviewed before publication. Enjoy your visit. Regards, David.

Monday 22 June 2015

May Sales Updates:

Anti Austerity march, Hastings
Straight into the May sales to bring me up to date before the end of June is upon us :)

May proved a fairly weak month with even my first place agency Shutterstock down from last month and a much lower number of the higher paying On Demand sales and three modest SOD sales.

Istock leapt to second place with 8 credit downloads and an astonishing 42 subscription and PP sales. PP sales came back strongly after their crash last month.

Straight in at third place came Redbubble with a T shirt sale becoming my first sale on the site.

123RF came in fourth with 11 downloads though without the boost from LEL sales that I had last month. They also updated their uploader which from my perspective didn't seem to have any advantages over the old version. On the contrary, the first seven images I uploaded proved tricky as there just seems no way to include punctuation in the caption field. This is important because they require a specific format for editorial captions (which include comma and dash signs). I have put these in dozens of times but when clicking to save they just disappear. I'm fully expecting them to be rejected for this -that is if they ever get around to reviewing them (been three weeks now).
Protest against zero hour contracts at Sports Direct, Hastings

In fifth place were Bigstock with 14 downloads -pretty much all subs again.

Sixth place went to FineArtAmerica with a sale of two greetings cards. These were of the local island bus on the Greek island of Paxos which I visited last year. Not a fortune but a pleasing sale all the same as it is one of my favourite Greek islands.

Now for the big disappointment of the month. In Seventh place were Dreamstime with just 6 downloads. These were all 35c subscription sales bringing a total for the month of just $2.10 -my worst month ever on DT (even my first month there in September 2009 produced nearly £6 in sales). What happened there? Thankfully June is showing improvements but I am at a loss to account for that May dive.

Finally in Eighth place I got one of my irregular sales on Canstock photo - a 30c subscription. If they ever start taking Editorial images this could become a much better seller for me but meanwhile I'll just add non editorials as and when I have them.
Greetings from Paxos: card sales at FineArtAmerica

Much of May was dominated by my signing up to Redbubble.com and learning all about how that works. I'll be posting an article on that soon -but early results are encouraging :)

The other event in May was, of course, a General Election here in Britain when to a lot of peoples surprise the Conservative party won a (small) outright majority. None of the opinion polls had predicted anything of the kind so the result was unexpected. This led to a number of protests and anti austerity marches across the UK, including here in Hastings. I photographed the march and have already had several sales on Shutterstock as a result. Regards, David.




3 comments:

Unknown said...

Hello David
I read your monthly earnings post with interest as I have been looking at selling stock photos recently. I wondered how many images you have out there at the moment to get these returns?

TIA

Paul

David Fowler said...

Hi Paul, thanks for your question. Most of my portfolio links on the right will generally give you the numbers but for quick reference the approx figures are:
Shutterstock/Dreamstime/Bigstock circa 1800
Istock circa 980
123rf circa 2000
Yay circa 2200
Picfair circa 900
Redbubble circa 200
Fotolia circa 100
Veer/Canstock circa 280
Fineartamerica circa 800
Of course, it all depends on the subject matter what sort of returns you will get -many of my ports have a lot of old archive images of politicians which only get used rarely (or not at all).
I had a look at your Google+ page and you have some great looking nature images which I am sure would do well if available for sale :)Feel free to use my referral links on the right if signing up anywhere -or not :) Best of luck with your images! Regards, David.

Unknown said...

Thank you for your prompt reply David. I have already signed up for a few but if I add anymore I shall surely use your referral links. I also sold an image on Picfair this week.
Best of luck to you.

PS: ill add you on google+

King Regards

Paul