LookStat – Microstock Analytics

Data collection services are back online and we’re rapidly crunching through our new account backlog. Thank you all for your patience over the weekend.

LookStat user Roberto Caucino is currently the featured contributor on the Dreamstime home page. Check out his microstock portfolio at DT – it rocks.

Congratulations on being featured, Roberto!

We will be doing some major systems upgrades over the weekend and the data collection system will be offline for a significant amount of time. We are very sorry for the inconvenience. You’ll still be able to use the website and view your existing stats. Updates will resume as normal in 24-48 hours. We have had large surge in users over the past few days and need to put these upgrades in place to ensure a quality experience for all our users.

Thank you and sorry.

We announced yesterday that we had closed a $500,000 financing round which was led by Founders Co-op and leading Seattle & Bay Area investors and entrepreneurs. Casey and I are grateful for the support of our users and our investors and we’re excited to have the resources to continue to develop our platform. News of the financing was on TechCrunch, TechFlash and Xconomy.

The site is running normally now and stats are being updated regularly. If you experience any problems, please let us know.

We will be taking the site down for some time today for some maintenance related upgrades. The website should be back up in a few minutes but data updates will be on hold for a while longer. We’ll update the blog once all systems are back up. Thanks for your patience!

I was playing around earlier today with Google Insights for Search and stumbled onto the search history from 2004 for weight loss. The results are striking. There are 4 times as many searches in that category in January as there are in December and this difference has held from 2004.

If you look at the Image Search results for the same category, the results are identical.

The takeaway is clear. Get your ‘weight loss’ related images online before that January spike. Although it’s not microstock specific, Google Insights is incredibly valuable for learning about what people are searching for and that can only be beneficial to deciding what to shoot and when to shoot it.

While I haven’t yet looked at microstock sales to see when those images spike (to find out what the typical lead time is) delivering that sort of information to contributors was one of the core ideas behind LookStat.

When creating anything commercial, it’s important to think about who will be using your work and how they intend to use it. I came across a fascinating article on color psychology (targeted at designers) and wanted to share some excerpts from it since I think the concepts it covers are very relevant to photographers looking to produce images that buyers will find useful.

I highly recommend reading the article itself but also thought I’d share two sections that jumped out at me. First, they have a list of color associations that are common in ‘mainstream North American culture’ (their words.)

Red –excitement, strength, sex, passion, speed, danger.
Blue –(listed as the most popular color) trust, reliability, belonging, coolness.
Yellow –warmth, sunshine, cheer, happiness
Orange — playfulness, warmth, vibrant
Green — nature, fresh, cool, growth, abundance
Purple –royal, spirituality, dignity
Pink — soft, sweet, nurture, security
White –pure, virginal, clean, youthful, mild.
Black –sophistication, elegant, seductive, mystery
Gold — prestige, expensive
Silver — prestige, cold, scientific

One caveat to the above list was to be aware that the impact of color varied considerably by region and to be mindful of local variations. With that in warning in mind, the article laid out a simple hypothetical example about how insight about color could influence a marketing campaign.

Let’s say that you are selling books for young children, but you are marketing to grandparents. You’d probably design the books in bright, primary colors (reds, blues, yellows) to appeal to the children who will use them. However, the marketing materials (web site, brochures, etc.) would be designed with grandparents in mind. You might decide to go with blues (trust, reliability), pinks (nurture, sweet, security) and yellow (happy, playful).

While the article is targeted at designers, I think it is very relevant for stock photographers. If designers are thinking about the impact of color on their audience, it is bound to affect their purchase decisions. As a result, while this information shouldn’t dictate the look and feel of your shoots, it should be a useful input in your pre-production process.

I’d love to hear your perspectives on the ideas above and whether you think about color in this way when planning an executing shoots.

(I was pointed to the article by a great list of Design Oriented resources on PSDTUTS)

We have added extra capacity and the system has been working quickly through our backlog. At this point, account initialization rates are largely back to normal. Thank you for your patience!