Hi all - wrote up a quick report on my progress in February.

$575 from just P5 and SS.

More info can be found in my signature link if you�re interested.

Would appreciate any advice, insights, critique, etc.

Yes, but people liking seeing how other people do. It sometimes helps give them encouragement, ideas on where to submit to, etc, etc.

Do you have a question? I don�t get it. Is this to draw us to your blog or something?

Stop being a hater.  Please!

Have you done much experimenting with lowering or raising your pricing?...any insights?

Hey wds - I'm in the process of testing pricing right now at P5. I don't have a huge portfolio, so it might not come up with any real concrete conclusions, but could be helpful.

I lowered my prices a few weeks ago after keeping them steady for about a year and saw sales volume increase almost immediately, but this could have just been a coincidence.

I did actually write about this on my site a few weeks ago, since you ask. Although it seems like there might be some sensitivity here about mentioning that...

What exactly do the good people at blackbox do? Upload your footage to all the sites you're already uploading to and take a nice 15% for the pleasure?

Genuine question, I probably missed something, but couldn't find much info on their website.

Yes 15% for distribution, but they have other placements or rankings than you might have as a single artist. On Fotolia/Adobe for instance they are sapphire status which is much higher than mine. It will take me many, many years to reach that. So the 15% for Fotolia is nearly zero in real results for me.

I don�t have sales yet, and obviously I don�t know what deals they have negotiated exactly everyhwere. I have been uploading for 20 days, so I am really not expecting miracles.

The biggest drawback for me is that they are not (yet??)) connected to stockperformer. I have suggested it, so I hope it does come eventually.

They have a growing and lively community and building a community and sharing tips and tricks is very important to them.

And they offer excellent royalty sharing tools. If you want to work with editors for post production or want to work with actors or a location that otherwise might be too expensive, you can negotiate a royalty instead or offer a mix of royalty or cash or footage for their own use. In a next stage, they want to give people the possibility to license short films or documentaries etc...it is really intended for people in the movie world.

What I really like is that they strongly talk about money, how to build passive income for your life and they keep motivating you to upload to build passive income. They don�t come from the "Oh, look you will get EXPOSURE" angle...it is clearly intended as a money building vehicle.

The place is new, I like it, people are responsive, you can write to them directly and will get personal answers. they have a mix of amateurs and pros, like everywhere. But they don�t edit your series, they leave that to the agencies, which is good. Files are exclusive of course, but can be removed on request. they just ask not to abuse the option, because it is a lot of work removing files individually from several agencies.

They don�t sell direct.

It has to work for you.

I find uploading to several places painful, plus I hope that a large portfolio that is fed regularly will always have better rankings than what I can do myself.

In a few months I will know more. We have all seen a lot of very well intentioned new places, but I like this one, so let�s see where it takes me.