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!

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!

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.

One of the questions my co-founder Casey likes to ask is, “Are we winning?”

This is a big question, but in the context of microstock earnings, we’re trying to see what our earnings trend is and how our month is likely to shape up. To do this in LookStat, the easiest way is to view the last 30 days and compare that number to your last month’s earnings. This way you can get a quick read on how the month is shaping up. If the total for the trailing 30 days is greater than your earnings in the prior month, then you’re on track for an upswing, and vice versa.

Microstock Earnings - 30 day snapshot

This is imprecise due to seasonality and other factors, but it’s a great gut check.

Over time, we will be adding in more metrics to help answer the ‘are you winning’ question. Having data is great, but giving that data meaning is where things really start to get interesting.

We’re pleased to announce the beta of LookStat – a web service from Orange Line Media that will allow you to make more money online with your digital photography and illustrations by allowing you to:

1. Track your portfolio
2. Analyze your performance
3. Automate your workflow

We started exploring microstock earlier this year and as technologists began developing tools to help us manage our own microstock portfolios. As we got further down the path, we realized that the tools we were developing might be useful for other contributors as well.

The service is very much in beta form at the moment but we’re confident that with some input from our users, the service will evolve rapidly.

The first feature we’re launching is performance tracking. We want to make it easy for you to monitor the performance of your images across multiple sites from a single location. Once you create an account with LookStat, we obtain your sales history, match your images across sites and present you with a complete history of your performance. We’re launching the beta with support for Dreamstime & Shutterstock and plan to add support for iStockphoto, Fotolia & 123rf in short order.

Sample Screenshot

Sample Screenshot Showing Dreamstime Data

One important difference between LookStat and other tools for tracking earnings – we look at your entire history. Once you start using the service, we build a complete picture of your earnings from the beginning of your microstock career. On top of this, we update your data periodically, so you can always see how you’re doing, from anywhere on the web.

We hope you’ll give the service a try and let us know what you think. I know some issues that will be top of mind are security and privacy. We take those very seriously and you can review our FAQ and privacy policy at the site.

We are confident that our security standards meet or exceed those of existing sites & software. All our site pages are encrypted and we have no access to your LookStat password. All data stored on our servers is encrypted and secure. Both Casey & I will be writing a lot more on this in the near future.

In addition, you should know that we’re eating our own dog food, as it were. We use the service to monitor and track the performance of our own portfolio. Our goal is to create a service that delights our customers (microstock contributors) and helps them take advantage of the growth of this market segment.