I did see a dip in January, but sales came back a little in February. Interesting first few days of March, RPD jumped to $4.11.

I do run windows only apps on my Mac - but only when absolutely necessary, not by choice. I use Parallels software to run TinyXP. I have set up a Windows partition and Bootcamp, but Parallels works fine for what I need.

I use an application called Deep Sky Stacker that is windows only.

I wonder how many sales they make on Alamy - without doing a search?

Either way, it appears to me that Alamy sales are FAR LOWER than the MicroStock sites we're all familiar with. Sure, I'll have a presence and a collection on Alamy, but I'm having much more success on the other sites - even though they sell for much less per download.

Question about Alamy is TRAFFIC. Are they getting any traffic, which leads to sales?

My quick look at their actual sales lead me to think differently.

I did a quick comparison of the top downloaded images on iStock and Alamy in the last month, and iStock's top 15 images for the month have been downloaded more than 6700 times. In comparison, you can sort by sales on Alamy and their top 20 images have sold 47.

Its great to have a collection of images available for higher prices, but I just don't think they're getting the traffic and sales that we see on MicroStock sites. You can have a great site, with a huge inventory 16M + but if there are no shoppers ...

What would the Googler be looking for? Prints? Cheap or free images?

In my opinion - the Googler is looking for FREE images.

Photoshelter mentions they offer great SEO - what is that (not SEO, I know what that is, what are they offering?) I picked a random photographer from their site and googled their exact photo title and it didn't come up in 15 pages. So what SEO are they offering?

I read it best - the direct sales model (Photoshelter, SmugMug, Pictage, Zenfolio) can offer a photographer an opportunity to fill the gap between Microstock and the Big3 agencies. The question is - is it worth the money? Even if you sell them at Micro-competitive prices, you keep 90%. A $12 sale will pay you $10.80 -- not a $0.30 sub.

More and more it seems buyers are LOCKED into subscriptions.

I am also a buyer and we stick to the sub 80% of the time, and rarely move up to RF - most clients don't want to pay the additional cost when they too have access to iStock and others online.

So I am wondering if there is a place for Micro-priced images on a direct sale site - and not the $300-$600 prices I see on Photoshelter.

Are stock photo buyers really buying in volume from photographers or just from agencies?

There is the BIG question, are photo purchasers looking outside of their subscriptions? And if they are, how often do they drift away from Microstock?

I keep reading about how people will still pay more for images, while we see microstock sales soaring and RF Stock companies entering the arena, and sales on Alamy very slow.