LookStat – Microstock Analytics

According to the Society of American Florists (SAF), Christmas/Hannukah is the top holiday for flower sales in the USA.

These stats surprised me, because I think of Valentine’s Day & Mother’s Day as the primary flower-buying occasions.

The SAF’s data show that centerpieces and red poinsettia purchases are the primary drivers of holiday flower sales. You can read more at the SAF’s site, AboutFlowers.com

Pay attention to these details when planning your microstock shoots so you have the right props and subjects available. (You do plan your shoots don’t you?)

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.

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

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!

‘Happy Care’ – smiling medical professionals and reassured patients – is the most common theme for medical microstock images. They were described perfectly in a comment from the last post on medical image formats and I’m including that here for reference:

“Happy Care” all the way, doctors need to appear warm, friendly, in control yet prepared to come down to the level of the patient and reassure them that everything is going to be alright. No one wants a Christina from Grey’s Anatomy. If only all Docs were Stock Docs!

– Neustock Images

Dominant Themes in Top 60 Medical Microstock Images (Top 20 from IS, DT, FT)

The data above are sorted according to number of images.

Points to Note:

• Happy Care Images are the most common theme in the Top 60 images and account for 35% of the images and over 40% of the downloads. They outperform the averages on all metrics being tracked.
• The ‘Stethoscope’ is the second most common theme and it is typically a medical still-life concept.

Medical Team – Strong Performer (Beware Small Sample Size)

While I would be wary of drawing conclusions from small sample sizes (anything with less than 5 images is a little suspect) the performance of the ‘Team’ concept was somewhat surprising. These are images of just medical professionals like the one below:

A quick TinEye search shows the image in use at a variety of healthcare services websites and sites like the American Institute of Healthcare Professionals.

Conclusions

• Happy Care is the dominant theme (and from our prior post, horizontal formats rule)
• Still life is a viable category for medical images
• There appear to be two conceptual arcs for medical imagery – one is imagery focused at patients (e.g. Happy Care) and the other is imagery focused on reaching medical professionals (e.g. healthcare services, healthcare technology.) For some reason, this wasn’t top of mind but it makes perfect sense.

We recently looked at the relationship between image format & views and downloads for Active Seniors. We’re continuing this sort of analysis across major image categories and our next series of posts will be on the top 60 medical images (Top 20 at istock, Dreamstime & Fotolia.)

Orientation vs. Views/Downloads/Conversion

Points to Note:

• Horizontal images continue to outperform the average (also true for active seniors)
• Square images have the highest views per image and perform only slightly worse than the horizontal from a downloads per image perspective
• Vertical images continue to under-perform the set average (also true for active seniors)

PS: The concept in the image above, which we’re calling ‘Happy Care’ (smiling, competent professionals & happy, relaxed patients) is by far the most popular medical theme. More stats on this in posts to come.

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.

I decided to analyze the orientation of the Top 60 images from the Active Seniors searches that I’ve been writing about and the results of that analysis are in the table below:

Key Points

• Horizontal images are the most numerous & best performing, on all metrics – conversion (dls/views), views per image and downloads per image.
• No square images in the top-sellers, in spite of the notion that square thumbnails do better.
• You are leaving money on the table if you don’t shoot horizontal and vertical formats

This isn’t really all that surprising. When we last analyzed the impact of shooting horizontal vs. vertical vs. square across millions of transactions, we came to the same conclusion – Revenue per image for Horizontal shots was twice that of other formats. Our reasoning was that as usage shifted online & microstock is purchased for online uses, horizontal image formats work best.

Are you using LookStat collections to see these trends in your sales? What are you seeing?

As I mentioned in my earlier post, couples were the most popular theme for active senior images. I was interested in the setting for the images (indoors vs. outdoors) and decided to analyze the impact on downloads and downloads per image.

I found the difference is very interesting. Even though there are over three times as many pictures of active seniors in outdoor settings vs. indoor settings, the downloads per image are significantly higher. Indoor shots perform 28% better in terms of downloads per image.

The average for all couple shots is 781.3 downloads per image, so indoors are doing better there too. I think it would be worth adding some indoor compositions to your portfolio if you’re shooting active seniors.