We just released a new feature which allows you to view the entire sales history for an image over it’s entire lifespan. You can drill down from all time to a single day and can filter transactions by site. To access the feature, just click on a thumbnail in your dashboard. As always, feedback is welcome and appreciated.
We are working on creating a page that allows you to see all sales for a particular time period and that should be available shortly.
The infrastructure issues we were experiencing have been sorted out and the site is functioning normally.
One of our infrastructure providers is having some issues and this is leading to 500 errors on the site for some users. We’re looking into it and attempting to sort through the problem. Sorry for any inconvenience. Your data is safe and secure and will quickly be brought up to date as this gets rectified.
For those of you who are attending UGCX in San Jose on Feb 9, a bunch of folks are getting together at 6pm on Monday to connect and talk microstock. If you’re at the conference, please stop by – I’d love to meet in person. You can find more details on this thread at the Microstock Group forum.
When: Monday Feb 9 – 6pm
Where: San Jose Convention Center Marriott (next to the convention center where UGCX is being held.)
Hope to see you all there.
PS: We are working hard on a cool new feature and we are very close to having it done. Stay tuned!
We implemented daily intrusion testing on LookStat and we chose to work with McAfee Secure. They test the site for vulnerabilities every day and it is the same intrusion testing used by some of the major microstock agencies.
We take security very seriously and I’m proud to say that we passed their scans on our first test. (Awesome work on running a tight ship, Casey.) You can view the security seal in our footer. The only issue we had was that I stupidly turned the service on on a Friday which meant that some weekend work was involved.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been speaking with a range of micro and macro photographers and one idea that keeps coming up is the notion of Earnings by Shoot and time to break even. The goal here is to track the performance of all images from a particular shoot over time and record the total costs of the shoot to get an understanding of profitability and also time to break-even – how quickly does a shoot pay for itself.
One of the challenges here (in addition to tracking) is interpretation. For example, if Shoot A has earned $10k & Shoot B has earned $5k you might think that A is better unless Shoot A earned it’s sales over 5 years and Shoot B has earned it over 2 years. Alternatively, if time to break-even for A was 2 months and B was 2 months, they might seem equivalent unless A cost more than B in which case, you might have to adjust your assessment. (my apologies if I sound like Captain Obvious)
One mistake that is easy to make (and I’m guilty of this on occasion too) is not putting a dollar amount on your time when thinking about expenses. Time is extremely valuable and the less time you waste, the more you can spend on activities that generate value. Experienced shooters understand this and that’s why they talk about things like shot lists, planning, careful prop selection etc. Their goal is to waste as little time as possible and spend as little time as possible retouching etc.
When tracking the cost of a shoot for your break-even analysis, it’s important to track total cost. This includes things like editing time, retouching & keywording time and also uploading time. In general, anything you do to the images has a cost whether or not you spent cash on it.
The quicker you can go from camera to sites, the quicker a shoot can start paying for itself.
This is just a quick note to congratulate one of our early users, Neustock Images, on being named Artist of the Week at iStock. Thanks for the support and best of luck in 2009!
The release is rolled out and the site should be functioning normally again. Reports for larger time periods should be faster for everyone although our largest users will still have to wait a while for their ‘All Time’ views. We’re committed to getting this to be much faster, but last night’s release was a critical part of that process. Thanks for your patience as we worked through the kinks. Also, I’d like to thank Casey for his 4am heroics. I stopped ‘adding value’ at about 2.30 but he powered through. Please stay tuned for more features in January and as always, thank you for your support!
We are back up and working through the data update backlog. Most users will have things back to normal within a few hours. A few, however, may still see odd data. We’re very sorry about the inconvenience and we’re working hard to resolve all the issues as quickly as possible.
The site is live again but data may have some discrepancies over the next few hours as the system sorts itself out and we fix a few last minute bugs. Thank you for your patience. If you have any problems at all, or any concerns please let us know. I’ll post another update when we have sorted out the final issues.
Some of you may get an ‘we’re accessing your data’ notice and we apologize for that. As part of this upgrade, we had to re-crunch everybody’s data.
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