LookStat – Official Blog

As we mentioned when we announced our analytics upgrade, we would be moving to a free + subscription model. We are making that transition today.

We are rolling out the ability to upgrade to paid functionality and we are offering significant discounts for users who were using LookStat before June 2, 2010. You’ll see the upgrade button when you log in at the top right of the page.

Key Points to Note:

• Everyone who is not on a paid plan will always have access to the free functionality.
• Initially, all users will be set to free. You can upgrade at any time by logging in and clicking on the upgrade link.
• If you have more collections than we’re permitting in the free plan, you’ll be able to keep them and they will continue to be updated. We will not take away any existing collections.
• There are significant discounts for upgrading by June 30th (and even more if you pre-pay for a year.)
• We have a 30 day free trial on all plans before you’ll be charged.
• You can cancel at any time but we do not offer refunds.

Why You Should Upgrade Right Away:

• 33% discount across the board if you upgrade by June 30th (this means annual plans are 44% off full-price monthly rates!)
• Full access to existing and new features.
• First access to new sites as we add them to the system.
• Private consultation & custom analysis.
• Helps keep our service alive.

We’re committed to creating software and services for contributors and we need to charge in order to continue to keep things running and evolving. Thanks for your support to-date and here’s to a successful 2010 (and beyond) for all of us!

Cheers,

Casey & Rahul

We’ve upgraded our LookStat Analytics service for all users. You don’t need to take any action. Most people should see the new site within an hour.

What do you have to do?
1. Nothing but we’d like you to try out the new site and send us feedback.

What does this mean?
1. Everyone gets the new LookStat Analytics service.
2. We will be going to freemium (free or subscription) model this week; For the next few days everyone will get to try out the premium service for free.
3. Existing users will get an opportunity to upgrade at a discount.

Where can I learn more?
1. Read our blog post on our new plans and pricing.
2. Read our blog post on the stats available to you.

Will provide more information here and in site shortly.

-Casey and Rahul

Performance ratios such as Sell Through Rate, RPI and earnings per download can provide valuable insights into what is happening with your portfolio. One of the new functions enabled by LookStat’s upgraded stats service is the ability to compare trends over different time periods.

To illustrate this, we looked at Summer 2009 vs. Summer 2008 for the portfolio below. In this case, we used June 1 – Sep 30 as the definition of ‘Summer’.

The best way to currently compare time periods is to log in to your LookStat account, open it in 2 tabs and then use the date control in the header bar to enter the date range you’re focused on.

Summer 2008

The above is a screenshot of a daily plot of sales at iStock from June 1 – September 30, 2008. You can see the slow uploading of images (28 at the start of the period to 88 at the end of summer) and you can also see the summary metrics for the time period in question. The other thing you can see is the three best-performing images over that time period.

Summer 2009

The above screenshot is the same period as the prior chart in 2009. You can see that no images have been uploaded to the account for a year. 2 of the top 3 images are the same. The second one, the pumpkin shot, didn’t start selling until the Fall of 2008 and so didn’t break the top 3 in 2008. (As an aside, sales for the pumpkin shot actually climbed over time.)

Performance Metrics

The summary bar below the chart contains core metrics and ratios that give you a snapshot view of overall performance during the period in question. I compared the metrics for Summer 2008 & Summer 2009 in excel and you can see them side by side below.

In this case, increased pricing ($/DL) and slightly improved sell-through rate couldn’t compensate for a 40% drop in RPI. The biggest factor behind the declining performance of this portfolio is lack of uploading. No new images were added over the course of the year.

Analyzing your Own Stats

The example above is for a small, inactive portfolio and doesn’t reflect the market as a whole. I was actually surprised that even with no activity for a year, sales declined by less than 30%. I expect that most of you seeing success with microstock will find that all your key metrics are green.

Ideally, you should be increasing the overall performance ratios of your images. So, for example, if you are adding images but seeing a decline in sell-through-rate, it could mean that you are not shooting enough saleable images, or you are uploading too many similars together. Analyzing your key metrics over time can help you identify opportunities to increase earnings.

The ultimate goal is to combine shooting what you love, with shooting what makes you the most money. We want to make it easy for you to do that.

Analytics is a big part of helping contributors operate more profitably and we’re making improvements rapidly (contact us to try out the latest upgrades). We have much more we want to do and new features that you’ll see in very short order. However, to keep investing in analytics and improving the service, we need to start charging for it. Our proposed pricing plan is shown below.

Proposed Pricing Plan for LookStat Analytics

Free, as in Free
We always plan to offer a free service and it is a huge step forward from the service that most of you access as LookStat today. The free plan gives you all the metrics that we have added to the system like RPI, Sell-through-rate, images added, downloads, and image level data. You’ll also be able to compare your shoots and collections to see how you are doing and which parts of your portfolio are the most profitable. Your stats will be uploaded less frequently but any improvements we make to core features and any new sites we add will be available to all users, free or paid.

If you have more than 5 collections but choose the free version of the service, we won’t eliminate anything. You’ll still be able to view and explore any collections you have created. For those of you that stick with the free version, you’ll see a much more powerful stats system than the one you’ve grown accustomed to.

Paid Plans
The paid plans increase the number of collections you can have, and give you more ways to slice and dice your data. If you’re a full-time microstock contributor, knowing what’s working and what isn’t and where things are going is critical. Understanding the RPI of one shoot versus another or which models earn the most in your business images versus lifestyle images can make a major difference in earnings.

Users of Pro & Max plans will be able to enter the cost for a collection and then track its ROI and how quickly it becomes profitable. The Pro & Max plans also add custom time periods so you can view how a collection performed in the Summer vs. the Winter, for example. Data update frequency goes up to once daily for Pro and twice daily for Max plan users.

Users who choose the most expensive plan get unlimited access to all features and also get customized insight and analysis. They will also be the first to get access to major new functionality such as benchmarking or keyword sales analysis.

If microstock is a major source of income for you, we think you’ll find that the Max and Pro plans will unlock a lot of value and will be a big help in profitable shoot planning.

We Need Your Input

Our users have always been a huge part of shaping what we do and I’d love your reaction to our proposed pricing. If you haven’t already done so, please contact us to get access to the beta. There is no charge for anything at the moment and you’ll still be able to access any collections you create once we make the transition. I’ll be posting next week about transition plans and how we plan to roll out the new services to everyone. In the meantime, please don’t be shy – tell me what you think.

There are a number of new metrics in the LookStat Analytics upgrade and I wanted to define them and point out how they can help you identify areas of opportunity in your portfolios. When you combine these with LookStat Collections, you can really start to get in and pull things apart to discover insights that will save you money and help you plan more profitable shoots. More on this coming soon. First, I wanted to define some of the metrics that you’ll see.

Revenue Per Image (RPI)

Why it Matters:

Allows you to calculate the earning power of an individual image or group of images. When you combine this with collections, allows you to compare shoots and concepts in an apples to apples fashion. For example, if you have a business shoot & a lifestyle shoot with slightly different image counts, the RPI of the shoot allows you to see which of them earns more per image and you can then use this information to compute your return on investment for the shoot.

How We Calculate It:

This is calculated on a daily and a monthly basis. The monthly calculation is Earnings for the Month/Images Online at the end of the month. This is then averaged over the timeframe being viewed. So, if you are viewing ‘This Year’ than the average monthly RPI refers to your monthly RPI average for 2010.

The daily RPI number is calculated as follows: Day’s earnings/Images Online that day. This too is averaged over the timeframe being viewed. Our view is that the daily number is the most accurate because it takes into account any uploading variations during the month. For example, if you uploading 1 image per day for 29 days and then uploading 500 on the 30th day, the montly RPI would skew very low which the average daily number would be more accurate. We are looking for feedback on this so I’d love to get your thoughts.

Sell Through Rate (STR)

Why It Matters:

Sell through rate allows you to see the overall commercial viability of your portfolio or your collection. If you have 100% sell through rate, that means every single one of your images has had at least one sale. This means that you didn’t shoot, retouch, keyword, upload & submit any images that no one bought. This is a good thing. If you find that certain shoots in your portfolio have low sell through rates, you are investing time and money in images that don’t interest buyers. Naturally, sell through rate is time dependent – for example, if you upload a 100 image shoot, it may take some time before all of those images see the light of day. Tracking STR after 90 days across different shoots for example is a good way to compare how they are doing relative to each other.

How We Calculate It:

We compute a daily STR (number of unique images that sold/images online that day) and a ‘Period STR’ which is the same calculation for the time period that you are viewing. Ideally, both numbers trend towards 100%. It’s normal for your daily value to be much lower than when you view All-time STR, for example. We’ll be working on some benchmarking data so you can start to see how

Trailing 30 Day Moving Average (T30)

Why It Matters:

This is the monthly trend and it smooths out the daily and weekly fluctuations associated with the normal weekly cycle of sales. When you overlay this on a chart showing weekly earnings, for example, you can see the general trend and how periodic peaks and valleys are affecting it. In the chart below, the orange line is the T30 earnings while the red line is the weekly earnings.

How We Calculate It:

As the name suggests, it is a moving average of the last 30 days. Our system also calculates the moving average of the last 7 days but we don’t currently display this. We felt the T30 line showed a better trend but we’re open to changing this. Please let us know what you think.

Getting Access

We’re expanding our beta program steadily and we’d love to have you try it. Please contact us for access. I’d love your feedback!

One of the core features of LookStat is automated image-level stats. When you create a LookStat account, our system builds a complete picture of your sales history for each image. Once this is complete, you can group images into collections and then start tracking performance of things like shoots, concepts, models etc.

Image Detail Screenshot

The screenshot above shows the earnings by week of the image above for last year. Clearly, this is a seasonal image for fall/thanksgiving and you can see how this plays out in the earnings chart. The image starts really selling in July (week 32) and then peaks in October (week 42) and drops down from there.

The lines on the chart are:

• Earnings – Weekly earnings of the image. This is the default time period when viewing a year, but you can also choose to view the data by month or by day.

• Downloads – Weekly downloads of the image. As stated above.

• T30 Earnings - This is the red line in the chart above and is the trailing 30 day moving average of the image’s earnings. This shows the overall trend line and is especially useful when viewing daily or weekly sales.

• Total Earnings – This is the cumulative earnings of the image over it’s entire lifetime. This should always be increasing. As you can see from the chart above, when the image isn’t selling, this line is flat.

• $/DL – This is the weekly earnings divided by the weekly downloads for the image. This line gives you a sense for the image sizes being downloaded. You can see above that the $/DL line peaks before the sales peak which is in line with the idea that print buyers use larger sizes

Transaction Register

In addition to the image charts, there is a transaction register that lists all transactions associated with that image. You can drill down by month and then by day to look at individual transactions.

Sign Up for the Beta

We’re expanding our beta program, so please contact us and we’ll get you activated. We’re really excited about the new functionality and we’d love to know what you think of it.

As part of our upgrade to our stats service, we are adding in a large number of new metrics to give you a better understanding of how your portfolio is performing. Over the next few days, I’ll be walking through the major changes to the site and I’d love to hear back from you about what you think and what we need to do to improve the system and fill in holes.

Dashboard Overview
The metrics you’ll see on the new dashboard are shown below:

All the metrics you see above are dependent on the time-frame you are viewing. The sample data above is an all-time view show is shown by month.

• Earnings, Downloads & $/DL – Earnings & downloads history for all your images. This is automatically initialized when you create a LookStat account and will then be updated once/day.

• Revenue Per Image (RPI) – this is calculated on a daily & a monthly basis and provides a way to normalize performance of groups of images. The numbers are automatically computed based on your chosen time window. The daily calculation looks at each day’s earnings & number of images online. The monthly calculation is similar and uses monthly earnings divided by images online at the end of the month.

• Sell Through Rate (STR) – this is calculated as a daily average and for the time period you are viewing on the site. It shows you the percentage of images that had at least one sale in the time frame you are viewing. Ideally, you want these numbers as high as possible since it shows that most of your images are selling often.

• Images Added – This tells you the number of images added to your portfolio during the time period you are viewing. When looking at an All-Time view, you’ll be able to see how many total images were accepted into your portfolio.

Collections Overview
In addition to a new overview block, there is a new Collections Summary on the dashboard. This is shown below:

This block lists the Top 5 Collections in order of earnings over the time-frame you are viewing. In addition, it provides summary data on each collection so you can tell at a glance how each is performing. In the example above, you can see that even though the ‘Couples’ collection is ranked #3 in terms of Earnings, it has the highest RPI shown. By creating collections for shoots and different concepts e.g. isolated vs. non-isolated images, you can start to get a very granular look at what’s working and what isn’t.

Earnings Overview

The Earnings Overview section shows the top 5 images ranked by earnings over the time period you are looking at. The summary shows the date the image went online (if available) and doesn’t show RPI since that is meaningless when looking at a single image. There is also a Sites Overview that lists a summary of earnings & RPI by site.

Request for Feedback

I’d love to know what you think of the new dashboard and also to see if there are metrics we should include that would be helpful to you. I’ll be writing about each of the major site sections over the next few days. If you are interested in a test-drive, please let me know.

We’ve been getting some great feedback from our initial set of beta users and we have been making improvements.

Some recent changes:

• Addition of monthly RPI. This is calculated by taking the earnings for a month, divided by the image count at the end of the month and then averaging over the time period being viewed. I’d love some feedback from you on if this approach lines up with what you would expect.

• Addition of all-time Sell Through Rate. Our system already shows the percentage of images that sell each day on average. We are also going to add in all-time Sell Through Rate so you can see how things are looking overall. This is currently a placeholder, but we’ll have it in there soon. This is currently live. The number depicted is the sell-through rate for the period you are viewing.

• Sortable columns. All column headings can now be used to sort lists. So, for example, if you want to sort your collections by RPI, just click.

All these metrics are also available by collection so you can compare your shoots.

We’ve been working hard to significantly upgrade our analytics product and we’re getting very close to releasing it to our users. The system is about to enter a limited beta so we can get feedback on what’s working and what isn’t.

We are really excited about this upcoming upgrade and the potential it will have to help our users figure out which shoots are working and where to spend their time. There are many new changes and metrics available and I’ll be talking about them all over the next few days and weeks. Some highlights:

• True Daily RPI calculations
• Earnings, Downloads, Images online
• Sell-through rate
• Collection RPIs – compare your shoots apples to apples!
• lots more to come!

It has been too long since we’ve updated our stats product and this has changed. I hope you’re going to be excited about what you see and I’m confident the data will give you an edge that will help you sell more microstock!

As I mentioned, we will be reaching out to a small group of users and will be running a very tightly controlled beta. If you’re interested in trying out the service, please contact us and we’ll add you to our list!

To the many users that have trusted us so far, thanks for your support and please help us spread the word.

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!