Thanks to you, our 450+ registered users, the Microstock Charts project is going great so far. What's not going so great is our plan to build new features while maintaining the service for free. We have two great advertisers who are giving us great financial support - thankyou to BigStock and CandyBox Photography. But it's not enough. We want to earn enough to pay for the new features as quickly as possible, but so far we haven't even earned enough to pay for the initial build of the system. So, while the current site is in no danger of being discontinued, we're looking at two changes to fund version 2 and all the great featured you've suggested:

Option 1 - Charge for the Service

Making Microstock Charts free for you, the end users, has been part of our planned business model from the start. We'd really prefer not to have to charge, though we realize this is often what it takes to keep projects like this moving forward and increasing their usefulness.

Option 2 - Sell Anonymous and Combined Statistics

We've had expressions of interest from some agencies and industry people about getting access to the statistics behind Microstock Charts. As we've made very clear on the home page, the Terms & Conditions page, and the About page, we've build this system so it can be completely anonymous for you, the end user. Besides that, we would never sell or publish or reveal in any way the data without first combining it and making it 100% anonymous. And finally, if we do decide to sell anonymous and combined data, we would emphasize the data of the Trusted Accounts, which is only a small portion of the total user base. But this is another option we're considering.

Tell us What You Think

We've setup a this poll and thread to get your feedback on these two ideas. Of course if you have a different idea, we're open to suggestions.

Thanks,
Lee & Amos

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.

The CEPIC New Media Conference has been announced today. Our fearless leader, Tyler Olson (leaf), is on the program, along with Yuri and Andres and plenty of other microstock representatives. The big difference with this conference is that it's in Europe!

Here's the details:

Location: Dublin, Ireland (Aviva Stadium - www.avivastadium.ie )
Date:  June 9, 9am - 6pm
Price:  �190

So far there's five MSG members confirmed on the program: Tyler, Yuri, Andres, Jonathan Ross and myself.

A quick background on CEPIC - they're the European association of picture agencies. It's primarily macrostock agencies, though Dreamstime is a member and other microstock agencies have attended their events in the past. Bruce Livingstone spoke at the last one. Their website is www.cepic.org

Don't get confused by the Congress. Each year CEPIC runs a member "Congress" with around 1000 attendees from member agencies and visitors. This 'New Media Conference' runs adjacent to the 'Congress'.  The Conference is June 9 and the Congress is June 10 - 13.  They're also in the same venue.  The cost of the 'Congress' is much higher, starting at �490 if you booked early.

Just to be transparent about my involvement, I'm working with CEPIC to program the speaker roster and help promote the event, but I'm NOT on commission for ticket sales.  I'm more interested in seeing as many of our group there as possible, having really enjoyed similar gatherings in the past. I hope this time we can get a similar MSG crowd together at this one too.

You may not yet be aware, but our fearless leader of Microstock Group, Tyler Olsen aka Leaf will be appearing at the User Generated Content Conference and Expo (UGCX) this February in San Jose. Not just once, but TWICE! 

Leaf is on a panel titled Servicing the Crowd: Business Opportunities around UGC where he'll discuss his experience creating and operating a business servicing a UGC market (microstock) - effectively representing all forums that cover UGC businesses. Not only has he built up an amazing resource which everybody in the industry watches (trust me, they ALL do!), but he's also created a real community - not just a few people swapping tips, but a real community where people know each other, help each other, throw the occasional insult, but generally contribute for the benefit of the community.

Leaf's second panel is Making a living in Microstock which features microstockers successful enough to live on their microstock earnings. They'll discuss and answer questions on how they've achieved that success and how others can do the same.

You may also recognise many others participating in the conference.
...alphabetically:

Yuri Arcurs - "the world's top selling microstock photographer"... enough said
Ellen Boughn - industry consultant and Dreamstime's Director of Content (and superstar blogger!)
Kelly Cline - the 'big time' food photographer from iStockphoto's exclusive ranks
Fred Durham - founder and CEO of CafePress - I know some people here sell photos on CafePress
John Griffin - founder and CEO of Cutcaster, and avid user of Microstock Group
Jack Hollingsworth - guru traditional stock photographer who's giving a solo session on "Stock 2.0"!
Jeffrey Kalmikoff - the Threadless guy!... enough said
Bruce Livingstone - founder and CEO of the microstock industry. Just kidding... sort of. iStockphoto founder & CEO
Rahul Pathak - founder and CEO of LookStat, the new microstock earnings tracking and analysis website
Andres Rodriguez - the outspoken top microstocker, aka "the nicest guy in microstock"
Yuval Tal - CEO of Payoneer, the Mastercard debit card microstock payout facility
Kelly Thompson - iStockphoto COO and guru architect of all things good at iStock
James West - co-founder and CEO of Alamy. Yes, ALAMY is there!

Bruce Livingstone & Kelly Thompson are doing a tag-team keynote, and Fred Durham is doing one too. Those familiar with the entrepreneurial field will be interested to know that Guy Kawasaki is also keynoting, and Craigslist founder Craig Newmark's keynote makes it four!

Impressive list, don't you think? 

The conference runs February 9 - 10, is at the San Jose Convention Center, in San Jose, California, USA. With a lineup like that, it's worth traveling to be there. You can get more details about the conference itself at the website, www.ugcxevent.com

Entry to the conference isn't cheap for most of us, but you can use Leaf's discount code from the ad at the top of the page (premium members will need to log out to see the ad).

For details on the photography track (where all the above speakers are participating) see this page: http://www.ugcxevent.com/phototrack.html
For a list of all speakers and their bios, see this one:  http://www.ugcxevent.com/speakers.html

Just to be clear, I'm promoting this event here because I think it's awesome and very relevant to us as microstockers. I'm conference co-chair and will be moderating the 'Making a Living in Microstock' session, but there's no financial benefit for me (or leaf) if you buy a ticket. However, it would be great for us to share it with you.

I look forward to reading your responses and I hope I will meet many of you there. If you have any questions, I'll be happy to answer them. Just post below, or feel free to PM me or contact my via my site.

-Lee

edit to correct link address

picniche.com is another microstock mashup website which returns the quantity of images and their combined downloads for the keywords you search on. You can instantly see the demand and supply for images in a particular subject/niche. It's only connected to Fotolia at the moment, but other agencies are coming online shortly.

I wrote about this site a couple of days ago but didn't get much of a response, so I'm coming here where I'm sure to get educated opinions. What does everyone think about this facility?

I'm surprised nobody here has mentioned it yet, but Crestock have launched their new updated website today.

I have a full review on my site, but in short, I think it takes them from near the bottom of the pile to near the top in terms of site design and usability. They've got some new features and thankfully kept their slick upload process.

Over the last few days I've had some of the images Crestock rejected suddenly jump from the rejected page into my portfolio.

I'm happy about it, but it does seem strange. 

Anyone else had this experience there?