Matt has a great post on his blog which provides a quick overview of the Top 20 microstock sites. If you’re into microstock, you should be subscribing to NiltoMil.
LookStat has been mentioned a couple of times around the web today at Microstock Resource and at Henrik Lehnerer’s PhotoInfos Blog. Henrik also added us to his list of stock photography resources. Thank you! We appreciate you trying out the service and taking the time to post about us.
We had slowed updates to every four hours to deal with usage spikes a few weeks ago. Due to ongoing improvements in our back-end infrastructure, we’ve been able to increase update frequency to every 2 hours while supporting more accounts than ever. Our goal is to get to updates every hour but we’ll probably stay at this level for a little while.
Over the past few days I’ve been speaking with some of our users to get a better understanding of how LookStat fits into their daily lives and what sorts of things they would like to see added to the service. It’s always inspiring and educational to get people’s opinions firsthand and I love hearing about how our users are updating their spreadsheets less often and using our screenshots to post their earnings on their blogs. Another fun part of these conversations is that I’ve spoken to people in the Seattle, New York, Dublin, Paris & Colombia in the last week. I think this diversity of participation is one of the fantastic things about microstock.
The input I’ve gotten has been very valuable and I’ll be sharing it on the blog in the next few days. In the meantime, I hope you’re all enjoying the holiday season. We’re enjoying some rare snow on the ground in Seattle and it’s proving to be a blast.
Snow in Seattle - Dec 2008
The Most Important Thing to Remember
We will never send you an email that asks you to click on a password reset link and no-one affiliated with LookStat will ask you what your password is. Ever.
The only mechanism for password reset at LookStat is via a secure page on the website.
Why We Did This (If you’re interested)
To gain maximum control over the security of the feature, we chose to implement a secure, two-factor, form on the website. This allows us to ensure that all your communication with us is encrypted at all times. No one other than you knows your password. If lost, it cannot be recovered, only reset.
Since every single page on the site is SSL encrypted, restricting the password reset feature to the site allows us to lock it down tightly. In addition, we require any user attempting to reset their password to give us two pieces of information they have shared with us in the past. If successful, we update their password and allow them to login using their new credentials. The password is never in the clear and is never sent anywhere via email or any other mechanism.
Security is something we take very seriously at LookStat and it’s front and center in all our product development efforts.
We’ve gotten a ton of great feedback from users (please keep it coming). We’re working hard to improve the service and in the weeks ahead, we are focused on:
We have also gotten some great suggestions about tracking sales by shoot, model and category and we’ll be working hard to try and bring these improvements into the service as quickly as possible.
Please keep the feedback coming. There’s a lot to do and we really appreciate your trust and support. And now, in keeping with our unofficial motto (coined by Lee – thank you!) – “Develop, LookStat Team! Develop!!!”
Just a quick note to let everyone know that our data backlog is cleared and updates should be proceeding as usual. The system is currently on a 4 hour update cycle.
At the moment, we provide earnings tracking for Dreamstime, Shutterstock & iStockphoto. The next site in the pipeline is Fotolia and after that we will be working on integrating the rest of the big 7 – 123rf, Stockxpert & Bigstockphoto. After this, we will add sites to the system based on user demand. As always, we’re open to feedback and would love your input in the process.
We are fixing some data errors for early users who had images with over 50 downloads on Dreamstime. Since some of our users have massive account histories, the recomputation is taking a long time. As a result, users may notice a lag of up to 6-8 hours in terms of data updates. Things should be back to normal by tomorrow morning (Pacific time.)
We are continuing to see new user signups at an increasing rate but due to upgrades to our back end systems, account initializations are moving faster than ever. Most users should have their LookStat accounts activated within 24-48 hours. In some cases, it may take up to 72 hours. If it is taking any longer than that, we will contact you personally with an update. The site currently says a week, but that should be updated shortly
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