MicrostockGroup

Amos and I have been working on another project. This one has actually taken us a VERY long time, but we're finally ready to launch it. Check it out here: www.microstockcharts.com

The idea is to take the spreadsheets that many of us use to track our earnings and other metrics and put it onto a website to get access to some cool (and hopefully useful) benefits.

The primary benefit is benchmarking. We haven't activated this yet as we're battling with time, resources and programmers and just wanted to finally get the site out there. For this reason it's also pretty ugly, but we'll fix that too. Back to the benchmarking... the first iteration will show you your earnings, downloads, RPI, RPD and STR plotted against the averages of a large group of other microstockers. We hope this will make for some very insightful charts.

The additional benefit of the benchmarking will be a general charts page which shows the combined and anonymous data of that same group of microstockers.  All together there will be over 40,000 files and you'll be able to see the charts for all metrics, updated as frequently as those microstockers update their data (which we all know is often multiple times per day!).  

The service is entirely private by default. You don't need to tell us who you are and you can register anonymously if you have any concerns.  However, if you want to share your earnings charts with the world, you can turn on the publishing option.  You can even publish charts without the figures if you prefer.  Here's the example of mine: http://www.microstockcharts.com/leetorrens

It's totally FREE too. We wanted to keep it free to use and we think we can do that by using referral links and advertising.  At the moment there's no advertising on the private pages while you're logged in and we'll try to keep in that way. We've invested quite a bit of cash in this, so we hope this method works.  Once we recover our investment we'll reinvest the bulk of the earnings to develop new functionality.

We'll be deciding which functionality to develop first based on the votes in our UserVoice Feedback Forum, so please head on over there and vote / suggest the functions you think would be most useful to you.  We'll keep this forum thread and board here on MSG as the primary place for discussion.  A big thanks to Tyler for generously providing us with this board.

A note on the benchmarking data:  We didn't want anyone to be able to maliciously influence it. So we came up with the concept of 'trusted accounts'.  I contacted some friends and pulled in a lot of favors to get people I knew and trusted to participate and input their data. I then marked their accounts as 'trusted', which puts their data into the pool of benchmarking data.  There's a healthy range of contributors, from top to bottom in both portfolio size and selling success.  To all those who did that for us, thankyou very much!  

Finally, I want to assure you all that I don't expect you to abandon your spreadsheets yet, but that's the ultimate goal. There's still a lot of things I do in my spreadsheet that this tool doesn't do, so I'll be keeping my spreadsheet around for a while too. I've listed all the things I do in my spreadsheet as suggestions on the UserVoice Feedback Forum and I invite you to do the same (just check your suggestion isn't already there first).

If you have questions or feedback, leave it here in this board. I hope you like the site.

I've just signed up. Thanks for your efforts… it looks a useful tool.

@PowerDroid it's still very basic so we don't expect you'll want to leave your spreadsheet yet. I use Google Docs for my spreadsheet too. There's only a few things I can't do that you can in Excel/Numbers, but the advantage of having it in the cloud and interconnected with stuff easily makes up for that.  It's that convenience we're aiming for with this project.

@runamock Thanks. Not so so useful yet, but we'll get there.

@Jan, we hope to have the benchmarking up and running in around a month. There's a few things we need to happen before then, including having all the trusted accounts update their data. The site was broken for a while, so many of them haven't been back for a while. If the advertising sells well that will help us accelerate things too.

Thanks Talanis, be sure to give us your feedback. We really want this to stay in line with what people want on this project.

I'm not sure that there is much point in comparing your own data with that of others unless they are direct competitors in the same subject matter. If that is the case then you'll probably be comparing their portfolio and their performance with your own already. What's the point in someone who shoots mainly business concepts comparing their data with a food photographer, an illustrator and a vector artist for example? Different subjects cost more or take more time than others and also sell quite differently too. What really concerns me is not total sales, RPI, STR or even total earnings ... profitability is all that really matters and of course that is impossible to judge accurately until some years after the shoot.

From usability perspective it is much harder to use than spreadsheet where you can have a table in which you can input all data at once. It's not very fast when you have to click around to switch pages to enter one number per agency.

On the bright side, when you collect  all the data from us (it means we do all hard work) you can do a lot nice statistical things. No mention that you can sell it to third parties. So overall it's great idea derived from LookStat fiasco when they could not collect data automatically cause agencies do not want to share it across industry. I wonder why iStock have API to share statistics and others do not want to that.

I know I wrote a lot in the initial posting, but if you take a look you'll see that's not how it works.  Third last paragraph. 

Agreed. We've got a lot of work to do to make it easier, and we may never arrive at a point where it's superior to a spreadsheet in terms of usability.


Please don't do "all the hard work" if you don't see the value in it.  We're only using the data from 'trusted accounts', so we don't benefit from more people using the service, aside from traffic on the site to help sell advertising. 

Our initial business model included selling the combined and anonymous data to third parties, but we opted to make that data public and free and support the costs with advertising instead. We think that helps the service have a better position in the industry as everyone stands to benefit. We'll see how things go with the advertising and referral links model, but for now we have no plans to sell the data.

The idea wasn't so much "derived from LookStat fiasco".  I actually shared this idea with Rahul over dinner in New York in 2007, well before LookStat was even the brand of Rahul's business. But yes, we always intended to avoid scraping data from agencies. That's one of my fundamental ideas. If the agency doesn't give me the data willingly via and API or XML feed, I won't take it.  That being said, I'm not opposed to leveraging the data from others who do so.

Finally, the iStock API isn't so much about sharing statistics. Understandably, they only permit use of their API when it's in their interests.  If you're referring to iStockcharts.de, that site scrapes data from the website pages and has never had official support from iStock management. iStock do share more statistics that most agencies though, which is generous, but also in their best interests.  If it wasn't they would have taken it off rather than 'blur' them with the >100, >1000 strategy.

Lots of interesting topics for such a small comment.  Thanks for the input. 

In some other thread somebody mentioned import/export which would be helping too.

I think value would come from the large volume of data. So if it is going to be limited to 'trusted accounts' (what ever it means: people from this forum, large contributors, etc) it's kind of pointless.  Regardless of the method of financing this venture (advertising or selling data) success would depend of volume of data to mine for useful statistics.In regards of agencies contribution to statistics I would say it is against their best interest. Main reason for that is that reliable data would prove that it's not profitable for most contributors and such data may stop flow of newbies trying to get rich quickly on microstock. Nobody actually can estimate how much they get from accounts that never reach payout limits. It;s kind of Ponzi scheme, it works only if there is constant flow of new members.

Ooops I did not get it in first place too.

Alternatively you can use baselining (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baselining ) but it would require some time to run it before you gather enough data to have baseline.

Just curious: How many iStock exclusives are participating in this?

How many are using the site?  No idea.  Those who register with a Facebook or Twitter account are totally anonymous.  Plus at the moment, I don't see there's any value in the service for istock exclusives.

How many are 'trusted accounts'?  None.  Until we can add some value to iStock exclusives I'm not going to ask any to participate.  I've spoken to a few about it and got some great feedback and ideas.  We're open to building iStock-specific functionality which would appeal more to exclusives, but we wouldn't want to duplicate functionality on the iStock site, nor get on the wrong side of iStock management. In reality, these ideas are not high on the list.

Also, the exclusion of iStock exclusives will be one of the (biggest) caveats when we publish the trend data from all trusted accounts.

iStock exclusivity is actually a big complication to this whole project, but we love a challenge.

I think you'd be surprised. Just look at how many people click google ads.