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 new feature for microstock analytics that we think has great potential. The feature is called ‘Collections’ and it allows you to create arbitrary collections of images and then track the sales of those collections.

You can access the feature by clicking on the ‘Collections’ link visible in the left column of the screen when you log in to your LookStat account. As you create collections, they will become visible in the left column, as you can see in the screenshot below. Images can exist in more than one collection, so you can create collections for shoots, models, concepts etc.

We’re really excited about the potential of the feature and would love your input as we build on this initial release. Thanks for your continued support and please let us know what you think!

We have been hard at work and a little too quiet (ok… way too quiet) about what we’ve been up to, but we’re finally ready to start talking about the features and services we have been developing. We just rolled out an update to our home page to reflect a new set of services that we have been providing to busy stock photographers for the past few months.

You Create the Images – We Do the Rest

We are now offering a full menu of Back Office services for stock photographers – keywording, uploading, submission & MR management – for a flat fee per image. Photographers are free to pick and choose whichever services they need, from the full package to selective elements based on their own workflow and requirements.

We have been providing these services for several months now to a core group of customers but are excited to open them up to a broader audience.

Why Offer These Services?

We believe that the workload associated with activities that aren’t directly tied to creating great images continues to go up and that this isn’t a great use of a creative individual’s time.

We’re committed to reducing friction and making life better for photographers and our goal with our Back Office services is to allow photographers to focus on doing what they do best, which is creating great images. We provide a flexible, cost-effective way to take care of the rest.

What About Analytics?

New feature development on analytics had taken a back seat to getting our services offering built out but we have added to our team and are back to active development on that feature. We will be announcing some enhancements to analytics in the next couple of weeks. We’re really excited about what’s coming and we hope you will be as well.

As always, feedback and questions are welcome. If you’re interested in learning more about our Back Office services, please contact us and we’ll get in touch right away.

We just released a new feature that allows you to view thumbnails of all the images that sold over a particular time period, from all the microstock sites we support. You get to the feature by clicking on the ‘Earnings’ link on the Dashboard above the Top Earners thumbnail strip.

You can filter the list by site and you can click on any image to get that image’s sales history. It’s a simple addictive feature and we hope you enjoy using it. Feedback, as always is welcome.

(Also, we hear you loud and clear re: getting more sites into the system. Fotolia is coming soon!)

Happy New Year everybody. I hope you had a great time, are sufficiently recovered and that you have a fantastic 2009. There are some great LookStat mentions around the web as some of our users are using screenshots to display their earnings. Thanks for all your support and feedback and for talking about the site. Much appreciated. If you are interested in microstock, all these blogs should be on your subscription list.

• jrtb.com: December Stock Results
• Microstock Experiment: December 2008 Earnings
• PDTNC: December Microstock Results

While we love hearing good things, it’s especially great to hear about areas where we could be doing more to make LookStat more useful for our users. Some of the items that have come up over and over again are:

• More Sites (Fotolia is next)
• Sales History for a Particular Image
• Ability to Define a Date Range over Which to View Sales Data

We’re working on all of the items above and you should start to see evidence of this on the site very soon. Please drop me a line anytime if you have ideas or questions. I love engaging directly with current and prospective users.

Thanks again for all the support and may 2009 bring you great pictures and massive earnings!