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Author Topic: RPI  (Read 3749 times)

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« on: March 25, 2009, 14:23 »
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 Recently on another thread people started talking about RPI's and there were some interesting misunderstandings that I wanted to point out. RPI is just simply your Return Per Image. The RPI is the gross money earned over a given period of time divided by the number of images you have available for sale. If you have 50 images and you made $500 over the month then that would make your RPI for that month $10, it is that simple. It use to be based off the life of the image, 5-7 years. Then it started being followed by the year, then the quarter and now it's down to monthly RPI. I would like to add that the shorter the time span the less accurate the data on your annual return because some months are much better than others so I think it is best to stick to the yearly average to base your annual income.
 This number is used to help you identify what your gross income is and what you can afford to spend per image to make the profit you are looking for. It is not after all your costs and expenses are included as one person said, it is before those deductions. If you deduct all your overhead and production costs then that is your companies net income, don't forget your salary in there.
 RPI is used less and less in the industry because it doesn't offer you the best feedback for what product is really making you the most money. It really is a blanket overall number that actually falls over time as your collection of images gets larger and older. What is being followed closer is Return Per Shoot. This approach helps you see more clearly if your concept and effort for a particular shoot are paying off or weather they are not. As well as Sell Through Rate. That is how many of your images actual sell in their salable life time.



« Reply #2 on: March 25, 2009, 14:35 »
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Earnings by shoot, return by shoot definitely makes a ton of sense.

There should be an option on Lookstat to manually group individual pictures that belong to the same shoot, and present the statistics of this collection the same way as now for individual pictures. I agree with the OP, for yield calculation, you don't need individual images but all the images from one shoot.

« Reply #3 on: March 25, 2009, 14:37 »
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 That was the original idea with RPI it was supposed to be over the life of the image not when it sold the best, first month or next year. That info is not of much use really. You have to account for the life of the image. You can kind of use RPI per month to help other issues in Micro. Like when is it the best month for me to upload my Christmas photos Oct., Nov., Dec. But now we are talking once again about per shoot estimations and not RPI's.

« Reply #4 on: March 25, 2009, 14:38 »
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Earnings by shoot, return by shoot definitely makes a ton of sense.

There should be an option on Lookstat to manually group individual pictures that belong to the same shoot, and present the statistics of this collection the same way as now for individual pictures. I agree with the OP, for yield calculation, you don't need individual images but all the images from one shoot.

This feature is very much on our roadmap. Arbitrary groupings of data - shoot, keyword, model etc so you can track earnings across those categories. I'm assuming you would want to be able to have the same image in multiple groups.

« Reply #5 on: March 25, 2009, 14:45 »
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I'm assuming you would want to be able to have the same image in multiple groups.

Not necessary for a shoot. An image can't belong to two shoots. Actually I love playing with lookstat. I've always been too lazy to keep earning spreadsheets. I found out that the "top shoot" in my mind/perception wasn't really my top shoot, since that one is industrial/editorial in a niche I'm virtually alone. Strange how you can deceive yourself... I think the keywords are overkill, but if it's easy to do, why not?

« Reply #6 on: March 25, 2009, 14:52 »
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I'm assuming you would want to be able to have the same image in multiple groups.

Not necessary for a shoot. An image can't belong to two shoots. Actually I love playing with lookstat. I've always been too lazy to keep earning spreadsheets. I found out that the "top shoot" in my mind/perception wasn't really my top shoot, since that one is industrial/editorial in a niche I'm virtually alone. Strange how you can deceive yourself... I think the keywords are overkill, but if it's easy to do, why not?

Good point re: shoot, my thought was an image could belong to a shoot but also an 'industrial' collection vs. a 'lifestyle' collection.

Really glad you're enjoying the site. I agree with you about our capacity to deceive ourselves. One of my hopes was that LookStat could help people better understand what was working for them. A user recently told me we helped him realize what his top selling image was (and it wasn't the one he thought it was)

« Reply #7 on: March 25, 2009, 15:31 »
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Good point re: shoot, my thought was an image could belong to a shoot but also an 'industrial' collection vs. a 'lifestyle' collection.

That was my thought as well, so I would like to be able to have the same image in multiple collections.
Btw, any dates for inclusion of FT and StockXpert? And for some update on the image matching?

« Reply #8 on: March 25, 2009, 17:03 »
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Good point re: shoot, my thought was an image could belong to a shoot but also an 'industrial' collection vs. a 'lifestyle' collection.

That was my thought as well, so I would like to be able to have the same image in multiple collections.
Btw, any dates for inclusion of FT and StockXpert? And for some update on the image matching?

:) Unfortunately I don't have a good date for you right now. We have had to do some back end work to deal with scale and performance and we're starting to see the end of that but I think we're still a couple of weeks off. Thanks for your patience with us.


 

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