LookStat – Microstock Analytics

LookStat Analytics allows you to ask and answer questions about your microstock performance that are almost impossible to answer any other way. For example:

• Do my business images outperform my travel images?
• Which Image formats sell the best?
• Do this model do better in business or lifestyle shoots?
• Which of my last three shoots is doing the best?

To answer any of these questions by hand, you could construct an enormous spreadsheet and enter thousands of data points, or you could create a LookStat account and do the same thing with a few clicks.

Analyzing Medical vs. Business Images

Let’s consider a scenario in which you wanted to study the sales of all your medical images and business images for the past 2 years to see what you should shoot next. There are two ways to perform this analysis. The hard way using spreadsheets, and the easy way – with LookStat.

The Hard Way – Spreadsheets

To plot and analyze two years  of data for 50 medical images and 50 business images to see which set had a better revenue per image (RPI), you would have to enter up to 73,000 data points to understand what was happening. (365 days x 2 years x 100 images). Even if you wanted to do the analysis for just 10 days, you’d have 1,000 items to record. Unless you really, really love data entry, odds are you won’t bother with this and will just eyeball things and make your best overall guess.

The Easy Way – LookStat Analytics & Collections

LookStat Analytics automatically tracks every transaction for all of your images. As a result, you can do this sort of analysis using LookStat with less than 10 clicks. The steps to do this are listed below:

1. Create a Collection

2. Search for Medical Images & Add All Results

3. Repeat the above 2 steps for your ‘Business’ images and you’re done.

As soon as the system has updated your collection stats, you’ll be able to plot and compare the performance of the two sets.

Collection Summary – Medical Images (All Time)

• 41 images
• $170.87 total earnings; 192 total downloads
• $0.16 Monthly RPI

Collection Summary – Business Images

• 205 images
• $423.61 total earnings, 511 total downloads
• $0.08 Monthly RPI

Interpreting the Results

• The portfolio above has 5 times as many business images as medical ones (205 vs. 41).
• Medical images have twice the monthly RPI of the business images. ($0.18 vs. $0.06)
• When planning future shoots, adding more medical images should be a priority over business images
  • Fewer medical shots in portfolio
  • Higher RPI than business  in this case

Conclusion

• Detailed sales analysis is virtually impossible to do by hand if you are trying to analyze performance at the image or shoot level.
• If you’re not doing this sort of analysis on your portfolios, you’re missing out on actionable data that can help you boost your earnings and improve your return on investment in the future.
• Sign up for a LookStat Account and start gaining insight today!

PS: If you do this analysis for yourself, I’d love to hear about your results if you’re willing to share them!

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.

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!

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 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!

We just released a new feature for microstock analytics that we think has great potential. The feature is called ‘Collections’ and it allows you to create arbitrary collections of images and then track the sales of those collections.

You can access the feature by clicking on the ‘Collections’ link visible in the left column of the screen when you log in to your LookStat account. As you create collections, they will become visible in the left column, as you can see in the screenshot below. Images can exist in more than one collection, so you can create collections for shoots, models, concepts etc.

We’re really excited about the potential of the feature and would love your input as we build on this initial release. Thanks for your continued support and please let us know what you think!

We have been hard at work and a little too quiet (ok… way too quiet) about what we’ve been up to, but we’re finally ready to start talking about the features and services we have been developing. We just rolled out an update to our home page to reflect a new set of services that we have been providing to busy stock photographers for the past few months.

You Create the Images – We Do the Rest

We are now offering a full menu of Back Office services for stock photographers – keywording, uploading, submission & MR management – for a flat fee per image. Photographers are free to pick and choose whichever services they need, from the full package to selective elements based on their own workflow and requirements.

We have been providing these services for several months now to a core group of customers but are excited to open them up to a broader audience.

Why Offer These Services?

We believe that the workload associated with activities that aren’t directly tied to creating great images continues to go up and that this isn’t a great use of a creative individual’s time.

We’re committed to reducing friction and making life better for photographers and our goal with our Back Office services is to allow photographers to focus on doing what they do best, which is creating great images. We provide a flexible, cost-effective way to take care of the rest.

What About Analytics?

New feature development on analytics had taken a back seat to getting our services offering built out but we have added to our team and are back to active development on that feature. We will be announcing some enhancements to analytics in the next couple of weeks. We’re really excited about what’s coming and we hope you will be as well.

As always, feedback and questions are welcome. If you’re interested in learning more about our Back Office services, please contact us and we’ll get in touch right away.

We just released a new feature that allows you to view thumbnails of all the images that sold over a particular time period, from all the microstock sites we support. You get to the feature by clicking on the ‘Earnings’ link on the Dashboard above the Top Earners thumbnail strip.

You can filter the list by site and you can click on any image to get that image’s sales history. It’s a simple addictive feature and we hope you enjoy using it. Feedback, as always is welcome.

(Also, we hear you loud and clear re: getting more sites into the system. Fotolia is coming soon!)

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.