Author Topic: Seasonal variations (Read 713 times)

Microbius · « **on:** April 17, 2012, 06:37 »

stockmarketer on another thread inspired me to do a deeper analysis of my own stats by month corrected for portfolio size (so trying to factor out the growth of my portfolio to see just the seasonal variations). The findings are from stats over the last 6 years.

I found almost the exact same thing as him but thought I'd post my findings just in case they are of any use to anyone, and to see if others found similar trends.

Starting January: Feb up, Mar up, Apr down, May down, Jun down, Jul down, Aug down, Sept up, Oct up, Nov down (surprised here, thought Nov would still be up), Dec down.
March and Oct being the top two months, December bottom, followed by Jul/ Aug.
Here's the percentage of total years income breakdown by month:
Jan 8.19
Feb 8.69
Mar 9.2
Apr 8.92
May 8.56
Jun 8.39
Jul 7.61
Aug 7.61
Sep 8.45
Oct 8.98
Nov 8.52
Dec 6.86

Where the "average" month would be 8.33 percent (100/12)

stockmarketer · « **Reply #1 on:** April 17, 2012, 07:03 »

Very interesting, Microbius. I suspect if I ran the numbers I would get identical results. But like you I was puzzled by November. My gut impression is that November grows from October, but looking back I see that the total does usually end up a hair under October. My take is this... November's daily take should grow from October for most of the month, but two things will keep the grand total a bit under October: there's 30 days in November vs. October's 31, and the Thanksgiving holiday in the US takes a bite at the end.

I bet anyone who has been at this for several years and generates a significant amount of daily downloads sees similar monthly breakdowns, barring any seasonal biases in ports (heavy on holiday related pics).

Microbius · « **Reply #2 on:** April 17, 2012, 07:14 »

I went back and had a look at the spreadsheet. I had used what I call my "adjusted RPI" which is RPI corrected for the length of the month (RPI/length of the month*30), so the length of the month shouldn't be the issue.
I have actually seen at least one November that was significantly higher than the preceding October, but once you factor out my portfolio growth, length of the months and so on, yup like you I found the average return down from October. That was the only real surprise for me, but it was still comforting to see that the sight decreases in sales I am experiencing right now are nothing to worry about.

gostwyck · « **Reply #3 on:** April 17, 2012, 08:00 »

Good work __ I must get around to checking my own figures. Of course this 'seasonal variation' is only accurate for a portfolio that is not being added to. A portfolio in November for example might easily have 20% more images than it did in January of the same year if the contributor is uploading regularly. I guess you'd have to divide earnings by the number of images for sale during that month to even out that variation.

Microbius · « **Reply #4 on:** April 17, 2012, 08:26 »

Exactly, that was the part I hadn't done before, these figures are adjusted to take out effect of portfolio size.
Of course there are other effects of rate of addition to a portfolio that can't be adjusted for like having work appear higher on searches sorted by most recent, but I am pretty confident that this is a good picture of how the seasons affect my income.
Now I just have to work out how many images exactly I need to upload to overcome the downturns....