LookStat – Official Blog

We recently rolled out some enhancements to the LookStat site which we hope you’ll find useful. As always, feedback and comments are appreciated.

New Thumbnail Grid

We have upgraded our thumbnail grid on the site to show image orientation. While it’s not as clean visually as square thumbnails, image format is an important part of analyzing sales and this was the primary driver of the change. (Thanks for the feedback on this one!) The new thumbnails coupled with the collections feature will allow you to analyze the sales of different image formats such as horizontal, vertical, square etc. I’d love to hear if your data mirror what we saw in our aggregate analysis of 2008 image format data.

Manual Image Match (Private Beta)

We have added the ability to manually correct the matches made by our system when tracking images across multiple sites. This allows you to break apart incorrect matches and allows you to match images that the system missed. If you’re interested in using this feature, please let me know in the comments, on Twitter or from our contact form. This is an early version of the feature and feedback and suggestions for improvement are much appreciated.

Once activated, you’ll see a link on the left panel of each image detail page (which you get to by clicking on a thumbnail anywhere in your account.)

From here you can click ‘Unmatch’ to remove an incorrect match, or if you select ‘Match Image’ you’ll be taken to a screen that shows the rest of the images in your portfolio.

You can narrow down the list by site. After you match images, it takes about an hour for the system to recompute totals. If portfolio data (see next section) has been activated for your account, you’ll see images sorted by upload date in descending order. If not, they’ll be sorted by date of first sale.

Complete Portfolio & Image Upload Date

We are in the process of rolling out the ability to see all images (not just images with sales data) and to track image upload date in your LookStat account. We will be rolling this functionality out to all users before long but if you’d like it sooner, just let us know and we’ll see what we can do. In the near future, we’ll be using this data to display stats like RPI (that takes into account image age) and sell through rate.

Feedback Appreciated

If you use any of these features, please let us know what you think and how we can make things better. Thanks for all your support and feedback!

We just released a styling update to the site and improved the layout of the Collections and Back Office pages. If you were logged in today and see some odd styling, please refresh your browser.

If you still see odd issues, please let us know in the comments or via our contact form.

We’ve had a great response to our uploading and keywording offer so we are extending it and opening up to all new takers. If you ask us, we will keyword & upload 25 images for you to up to 10 sites at no charge, with no strings. Just create an account at LookStat or fill out our contact form to request more information. We’re confident that once you get a feel for the quality of service we deliver you’ll want to continue. Regardless, we would appreciate your feedback and input.

As some of you may have noticed, we have not made updates to our Analytics product for a couple of months and this situation is likely to persist through early Fall. We are committed to bringing you image level analytics across a broad range of sites but as a small company in this economic environment, we also have to focus on revenues and profitability. A result of this focus has been a shift over the past few weeks to developing a suite of outsourced services for high volume stock photographers and you’ll be hearing more about LookStat Back Office services in very short order.

I am sorry for not communicating this to all of you sooner but I had wanted to wait until we had more clarity internally. In retrospect, this was a mistake and I should have been more open with all of you about the issues that we were facing. I own this decision and I hope you will accept my apology in this regard.

We remain big believers in microstock and are excited to see the growth in the industry and we remain committed to working with contributors and helping them sell more microstock. It has been very hard for Casey and I to make this adjustment and know that it means we could not enhance our analytics at the pace we want. We appreciate the support and patience of every single one of our users and we remain committed to this product and we will be turning out attention back towards it by the end of the summer. Until then, progress on analytics will be slow.

I will be updating you regularly on our progress and once again, thank you for all your trust, encouragement and support.

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.

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!

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!