So what did March 2009 bring to the world of microstock photography:

Yaymicro anounced a 25% increase in sales during February compared to previous months. The also appointed themselves a new CTO, Oddbjorn Sjogren.

Shutterstock reached 6 million images (actually this was in late February) less than 4 months after announcing they reached 5 million, I've almost given up posting individual articles when the big agencies reach a million mark... until 10 million comes! Shutterstock's Jon Oringer stated that this was "Thanks to more than 144,000 submitters who continue to contribute to our library".

Cutcaster launched support for corporate buyer accounts.

At the start of the month istockphoto reminded us to look at the url bar when we log in to any website and not to enter our passwords into a forum post. The phishing attack on their own forums resulted in the site being taken down and visitors who logged in that day asked to reset their passwords, the whole deal was handled quite professionally.

Pixmac have been actively marketing themselves with awards for uploads and a competition (referral link). I feel they launched their site too early (in november last year), with not enough information about what their plans were. This confusion upset some photographers thinking they might have stolen their images, others have ignored the site assuming they just want to be a reseller for fotolia. The development going on which now sees the site more mature and feature rich, seems to indicate that pixmac genuinely want to create their own collection as well as (perhaps for the time being?) reselling fotolia images. I've not written them off just yet.

Getty finally launched their much spun 'flickr collection' with early reviewers reporting around 4000 images being available instead of the 10,000 Getty had planned. Not really microstock news, but something that a lot of photographers with their work on flickr are quite curious about.

Poor old stockxpert, sigh. Since the split with jupitermedia their affiliate program was terminated without notice. Weeks later, as of writing this, broken links are still on their site offering a 'new' signup. After stockxperts previous nasty surprise in October last year I'm beginning to wonder what's happening over there. I'm sure there are staff there who do genuinely care, but are their hands now tied from a long distance with getty tape? With Getty owning two different microstock offerings (IS and SXP) and also pushing their flicker collection then the mind will wonder...

Back in February, canstockphoto announced their new upload system. I have had time to test it this month and find the system is now far more streamlined with the removal of the need to select categories for each image.

Finally, on a more personal note at the start of the month Crestock (2/15 images approved) accepted more of my images than Shutterstock (1/15 approved) - a somewhat dismal start to the month. Shutterstock did however bounce back to their usual level for later batches with something around 80% acceptance.

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