LookStat – Microstock Analytics

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.

We have been working hard over the past few weeks on a free 35-page guide for RM & RF stock photographers who are interested in microstock. Microstock is a growing part of the stock photography market and it’s important to stay informed about it, especially in light of the convergence taking place between micro & RF.

The guide provides an overview of what microstock is and how to get started. It also contains profiles of the top sites, details on their application process, and a submission checklist which covers the latest requirements for creating accounts and uploading and submitting images.

We wrote this to answer a lot of the questions we hear about microstock, especially from established stock photographers interested in adding another revenue stream to their portfolios. I hope you’ll find it a useful and helpful reference.

I know a some of you will know most of this information cold, but hopefully you know someone else that would find it useful. Please help me spread the word about this by tweeting about the guide or sharing it on Facebook.

Thank you for your help and support. As always your comments and feedback are greatly appreciated.

Given that Valentine’s Day is around the corner and I’ve already posted about Easter, I thought I would take a look at the other upcoming holidays. As part of this research, I found some fascinating stats on on number of greeting cards sent by occasion at Hallmark.com. I’ve added the table below.

I was a little surprised to see Mother’s Day so high on the list. The fact that 50% more cards are sent on Mother’s Day vs. Father’s day is interesting as well. Also, according to Hallmark’s page on Mother’s Day, this is the largest card-sending holiday for the Hispanic community. As a quick test, I did a search on iStock for ‘Mother’s Day’ and sort by downloads – three of the top 5 images have ‘Latin American & Hispanic Ethnicity’ in their keywords.

iStock – Ordered by Downloads

I also thought it would be interesting to take a look at the first row of results that get returned on the default search sort order from iStock, Getty, Corbis & Flickr

Corbis – Best Match

Flickr – Relevance

Getty Images – Default Sort

iStockphoto – Best Match

In general, there’s a similar feel to the stock images but Flickr stands out with the dominance of floral shots in the top search results. Not sure what to make of that pattern but I wouldn’t recommend shooting more flowers. The agencies have more than enough of those.

In terms of what wasn’t there, I was a little surprised not to see more ‘breakfast in bed’ and ‘mum chilling out’ type shots. Another odd thing to me was that there were virtually no men in any of the shots. Given than 2007 was a peak in US history for new births, I thought I’d see more ‘young mother & husband & baby’ images.

Things to Note

• Mother’s Day in the USA is Sunday, May 9th in 2010 (if seasonal microstock trends hold, then 2-3 months before is the time to start uploading)
• Gifts, cards, brunch & flowers are the top related search keywords

I’d love to hear your perspectives on what has and hasn’t worked in your mother’s day shots. In any case, I’m going to make sure I don’t short change my Dad this year.

Last week I wrote about total earnings and downloads and the trends associated with pricing, downloads and earnings. In this post, I looked at the same data and adjusted for active users in that year to get an average per user for the year in question. The results are shown below (the earnings per download line is carried over from last week.)

User-adjusted Earnings and Downloads 2002-2009

Key Takeaways

• Declining downloads per user after 2007
• Slowing growth in earnings per user
• Increasing earnings per download

Although earnings per user have continued to rise, the downloads per user peaked in 2007 and have since declined about 20% from 2007 to 2009. These data support some of the things I heard at PDN and UGCX about flat downloads and increased earnings driven by price increases.

Increasing Competition & Higher Standards

As more contributors enter microstock, especially in a down economy when people are looking for other sources of income, there has been an increasing sense  that it is harder than ever to make money in microstock. If you layer on tougher acceptance standards, you can make a case that new contributors will have a tougher time establishing themselves in the market. This then suggests lower downloads and lower earnings per contributor

Competition isn’t the Whole Story

Increased competition and tougher standards only account for part of what is happening. I think there is no question that new contributors and images are entering the market at increasing rates. If the growth of new users exceeds the growth of the overall downloads, then we’ll see a decline in the per user averages. If increasing competition was the only factor however, we would also expect to see a decline in earnings per user. Clearly, this is not the case. Also, one thing that isn’t clear here is if competition is actually hurting established players or whether new entrants are just struggling without creating an impact on existing users. (A cohort analysis could help illuminate this but that is a post for another day.)

On Average, Users Are Earning More

Price increases by the agencies and increased pricing of individual images as they begin selling more are factors driving up user earnings. As contributors gain experience and their images sell, they benefit from increased pricing for their images as well as better placement in search results. There is a little survivor bias at work – you only stick around if you’re seeing success. It is interesting that this effect is more than compensating for the reduction due to competition, market factors etc.

Conclusions

It is harder to break in to microstock and succeed but there is no question that the market has grown overall, through difficult times. While there are many new entrants and standards are rising, increasing earnings per user suggest there is still opportunity in the market.

I’d love to hear people’s thoughts and interpretation in the comments.

As part of my analysis of seasonal trends, I looked at LookStat‘s 2008 data for images tagged with ‘Easter’ as a keyword. In addition, I did some quick search keyword analysis to see if there were any useful pieces of data.

2008 Royalties for Images Tagged with ‘Easter’

Easter was on March 23, 2008 in the USA. As you can see from the chart above, the 7-day moving average crosses the daily mean about two months before the holiday itself. In this case, January 5. The peak of the curve is one week before the holiday on March 16. This is very similar to the patterns I saw in the Thanksgiving data.

Easter Eggs are 3 time More Popular Than the Easter Bunny

The Google Trends data for Easter shows an identical pattern to the microstock earnings data shown above. One very interesting nugget that jumped out was in the search keywords. There are 3x as many searches for Easter eggs as there are for the Easter Bunny. I’m not sure why this was surprising to me but i had expected the Bunny to fare a little better.

Conclusion

Easter will be on Sunday, April 4, 2010 in the USA. There’s still time to get your Easter images online before the sales really start to ramp in January/late Feb. Also, don’t forget to decorate and shoot those Easter Eggs!