LookStat – Microstock Analytics

“It is true that you can succeed best and quickest by helping others to succeed.” – Napoleon Hill

Although Napoleon Hill wasn’t talking about microstock, his advice remains relevant. If you focus on helping image buyers succeed, you’ll make more money in microstock.

One way you can do this is by studying how images are used in ads. A recently launched site, Moat.com, let’s you do just that. (Moat also intends to provide engagement analytics, but you’ll have to wait, and pay for that service.)

I searched for some major advertisers on Moat and found a range of ads that are worth examining.

From right to left, we have Netflix, Pfizer, Aetna, and Lifelock. Netflix is demonstrating their service, while the others are selling peace of mind.

Some Observations:

• Images are horizontal, and subjects are off-center in 3 out of 4 ads to leave room for copy.
• Models are looking directly at the camera in 2 out of 3 of the ‘peace of mind’ ads. Eye contact does suggest trust, so this makes sense.
• Netflix’s models are pointing at the ad, and the ad is directly above the ‘Click Here’ button. (This makes sense since we read from left to right in English.)
• Models in portrait style shots are looking at the camera, but their shoulders are at an angle. (I don’t know if this is significant, but I think it’s interesting.)

This isn’t a statistical analysis, but I think studying how buyers pair images with concepts will tune you in to their needs. In turn, this will help you plan your shoots and produce more salable images.

Other Examples:

To save you time, here are links to some of the brands I searched for:

• Healthcare: Aetna, Pfizer, United Healthcare.
• Financial: Citigroup, Lifelock.
• Travel: Princess Cruises, Travelocity, Westin Hotels.
• Lifestyle: Kohl’s, Netflix, Target.

NB: Product retailers use their own products, but I think it’s still instructive. Service providers seem to use more stock imagery.

Do you know how the ethnicity of your models impacts your microstock earnings?

You can find this out using LookStat collections. I’ll walk through how to do this for the following groups: African American, Asian, Caucasian, and Hispanic.

1. Create a Collection for the first group — ‘african_american’ in this case:

2. Enter the following keyword sets and add all results to the collection:

• HAVING: african%
• NOT HAVING: hispanic%, caucasian%, asian%, %indian%, divers%, mixed%

(We’re use both fields so we can isolate each ethnic group)

4. Repeat steps 1-3 above for each ethnicity using the keyword sets below:

• African American:
  • HAVING:  african%
  • NOT HAVING:  hispanic%, caucasian%, asian%, %indian%, divers%, mixed%
• Asian
  • HAVING:  asian%
  • NOT HAVING:  hispanic%, caucasian%, african% %indian%, divers%, mixed%

• Caucasian
  • HAVING:  caucasian%
  • NOT HAVING:  hispanic%, african%, asian%, %indian%, divers%, mixed%

• Hispanic
  • HAVING:  hispanic%
  • NOT HAVING:  african%, caucasian%, asian%, %indian%, divers%, mixed%

5. Analyze the Results:

• LookStat will update your collections within an hour.
• View each collection and compare their relative performance.
• Combine other keywords with ethnicity to analyze impact by category – for example: ‘african%, business%’ vs. ‘caucasian%, business%’.

Sign up for free today and start using LookStat to make decisions about which models to use in your next shoot.

We’ve added ‘Title’ & ‘Description’ to LookStat Collections. You can now search these two fields, as well as keywords, and upload date to analyze your performance.

If you’re Exclusive, or a Videographer at iStock, it’s now easy to create collections to track Vetta and Video sales.

For Vetta:   Put the keyword ‘%vetta%‘ into the Title field as shown above.
For Video:  Put the keyword ‘%video%‘ into the Title field above.

For More Insight:
Combine the above with keywords to further analyze your Vetta & Video stats. For example, you can easily see if men or women sell better in Vetta versus your overall portfolio — just combine the ideas here with the tips from our last post on analyzing the impact of gender.

Sign up for free today and start using LookStat to analyze your stats.

Do you know whether casting a male or a female model for your next shoot will make you more money?

You can easily answer this question with LookStat collections. By analyzing collections for women and men you’ll make the most profitable decision. The steps to do this are:

1. Create a Collection for Women Only:

• Click ‘Create Collections’ in the left menu bar.

• Name the collection. In this case, I’ve called it ‘women_only’.

• Expand the time range to include all your images (I normally set the ‘From’ year to ’2000′) and then enter the keywords shown below to isolate images with women only.
  Having Keywords: “female” ; Not Having Keywords: “men, man, male, father, husband, grandfather, grandson, son, boy”.

• To analyze a specific category, just add the relevant term to the ‘Having’ field. For example – “female, business” will limit the search to business images with only women in them.

2. Create a Collection for Men Only:

• Repeat the steps in #1 above but use the following keywords when you create the collection:
  Having: “male” ; Not Having: “women, woman, female, mother, wife, grandmother, granddaughter, daughter, girl”

3. Analyze the Results:

• LookStat will recalculate statistics for your new calculations in an hour.
• View each collection and compare their RPI, STR (sell through rate) and overall earnings.

Sign up for free today and start using LookStat to make casting decisions that make you more money.

P.S. If you try this for your own images, please share your results in the comments. Do men or women generate a higher RPI for you?

LookStat metrics and collections makes it incredibly easy to compare how well different concepts perform in  your portfolio. For this post, I compared images shot indoors versus images shot outdoors in an account that we are allowed to share publicly. The LookStat Index displayed below is a rating for the entire set.

About the New LookStat Index (LSI)

• LSI Calculation:  Earnings per Download x Sell Through Rate x RPI
• LSI provides a complete score for a group of images by capturing:
  - Pricing (Earnings per Download)
  - Royalties (RPI)
  - Overall Portfolio Quality (Sell Through Rate)
• A more detailed post on the LSI will be coming soon.

Indoors vs. Outdoors

Points to Note:

• The Outdoor images have a 31% higher LSI than the Indoor images.
• Indoor images had a better Sell Through Rate, but fell behind on earnings per download and RPI.
• LSI values above are low – they can be up to 100 times higher for higher quality collections.
• LookStat computes these metrics automatically – doing it by hand for 2,000+ images is practically impossible.

Sign up for LookStat and start calculating your own LSI today. Tracking this over time will give you a clear picture of your progression in microstock and LookStat does this automatically for you.

One of the most powerful ways to use LookStat is to answer questions about your sales stats. With LookStat, you can use collections to analyze segments of your portfolio and then derive a rating to compare them.

For example, in this case, I was curious about whether the ethnicity of models in shots of couples had any impact on sales and performance.

I’ll walk through the analysis with a sample account so you can do the same for your stats.

Question:
Does the ethnicity of the models in couple shots have an impact on sales performance?

Answer:
Create two LookStat collections and then compare the performance ratios:

1. Log in to your LookStat account.
2. Click ‘Create Collection’ in the left nav bar.
3. Create two collections: one with the search ‘couple, caucasian’ and the other using ‘couple, african american’ – in each case, adding all images to the collection.
4. The system will update the collections within an hour and you can then dig into the analysis.

(For a tutorial with screenshots, check out our recent post – “How Big is Your Spreadsheet?“)

Interpreting Results
Screenshots of the collections results are shown below (you can click through on each image to see a full-size version.) The screenshots show the earnings & uploading trend as well as key performance metrics.

African American Couples

Caucasian Couples

Comparing Collections:
Given the disparate data above, it can be hard to compare the collections. However, as you can see below, even though all the metrics vary significantly, you can use the performance ratios in your LookStat console to come up with a collection rating.

This clearly shows that even though Earnings per Download are lower for the collection of African American couples, it’s a stronger performing collection once you account for Sell Through Rate and RPI. (Since bigger is better for each of the metrics, a multiplicative combination works well.)

The Collection Rating lets you compare collections even though all the individual components are different. The best part of this is that the components of that number are computed for you automatically.

LookStat Makes It Easy
LookStat makes it very easy for you to do this kind of analysis on your shoots and for your overall portfolio. You can see which shoots or concepts perform better or worse than average by setting up a few collections and letting the system crunch the numbers. While you could theoretically do this by hand, the amount of data you’d have to gather and analyze would be a nightmare.

Sign up for a LookStat account and let me know what you think!

PS: The great thing about the Collection Rating is that you don’t have to publish any earnings figures. LookStat automatically calculates the ratios for you. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this and I hope you’ll share the results of your analysis.