We had slowed updates to every four hours to deal with usage spikes a few weeks ago. Due to ongoing improvements in our back-end infrastructure, we’ve been able to increase update frequency to every 2 hours while supporting more accounts than ever. Our goal is to get to updates every hour but we’ll probably stay at this level for a little while.
Over the past few days I’ve been speaking with some of our users to get a better understanding of how LookStat fits into their daily lives and what sorts of things they would like to see added to the service. It’s always inspiring and educational to get people’s opinions firsthand and I love hearing about how our users are updating their spreadsheets less often and using our screenshots to post their earnings on their blogs. Another fun part of these conversations is that I’ve spoken to people in the Seattle, New York, Dublin, Paris & Colombia in the last week. I think this diversity of participation is one of the fantastic things about microstock.
The input I’ve gotten has been very valuable and I’ll be sharing it on the blog in the next few days. In the meantime, I hope you’re all enjoying the holiday season. We’re enjoying some rare snow on the ground in Seattle and it’s proving to be a blast.
Snow in Seattle - Dec 2008
We’ve gotten a ton of great feedback from users (please keep it coming). We’re working hard to improve the service and in the weeks ahead, we are focused on:
We have also gotten some great suggestions about tracking sales by shoot, model and category and we’ll be working hard to try and bring these improvements into the service as quickly as possible.
Please keep the feedback coming. There’s a lot to do and we really appreciate your trust and support. And now, in keeping with our unofficial motto (coined by Lee – thank you!) – “Develop, LookStat Team! Develop!!!”
Just a quick note to let everyone know that our data backlog is cleared and updates should be proceeding as usual. The system is currently on a 4 hour update cycle.
At the moment, we provide earnings tracking for Dreamstime, Shutterstock & iStockphoto. The next site in the pipeline is Fotolia and after that we will be working on integrating the rest of the big 7 – 123rf, Stockxpert & Bigstockphoto. After this, we will add sites to the system based on user demand. As always, we’re open to feedback and would love your input in the process.
We are fixing some data errors for early users who had images with over 50 downloads on Dreamstime. Since some of our users have massive account histories, the recomputation is taking a long time. As a result, users may notice a lag of up to 6-8 hours in terms of data updates. Things should be back to normal by tomorrow morning (Pacific time.)
We are continuing to see new user signups at an increasing rate but due to upgrades to our back end systems, account initializations are moving faster than ever. Most users should have their LookStat accounts activated within 24-48 hours. In some cases, it may take up to 72 hours. If it is taking any longer than that, we will contact you personally with an update. The site currently says a week, but that should be updated shortly
Last week we released some major updates to our data acquisition systems and also a couple of new user facing features on the site. The behind the scenes changes generally boost the stability and speed of account initialization and ongoing data collection. This should mean fewer site slowdowns when new users sign up.
Also, thanks to some user feedback, we tweaked our charts slightly to add tooltips on hover and more logical presentation of results when you drill down into the earnings view for a particular site. We also added the ability to change the stored login credentials and your LookStat password. This way, if you’re changing your passwords as part of your regular security regimen, you can update them on LookStat and the system won’t miss a beat.
Thank you to all our users for your support and feedback. We’re working hard to make the system more and more useful to you. Please keep your feedback and suggestions coming.
We released an update to the LookStat service yesterday. Some of the visible changes are support for adding sites to your account and updating both your LookStat and your microstock site login credentials. We’ve also made some tweaks to charting which should lead to more readable and logical earnings graphs. We have also made some improvements to the back-end which should help up speed up account initialization and make the system more robust and fault tolerant.
James has screenshots and some really nice things to say about LookStat on his blog post about his November Earnings.
This month, in honor of the fantastic lookstat.com beta release, I’ll be using screenshots directly from lookstat for my stats. Talk about saving time! Thanks lookstat!!!
Thanks for the kind words, James. We’re delighted to have you as a user and hearing that we’re reducing the amount of hassle in your life is terrific. We’ve been readers of your blog for a little while now so it’s great to be mentioned on it.