Hi all,
I'd like to introduce myself. My name is Michael and I'm from Austria. I've been doing microstock with shutterstock for about one year now and recently also joined the other "big" microstock agencies. I don't know about you, but I'm one of the statistic freaks who usually check their sales very frequently. Of course, when I joined all the other microstock sites, this got very time consuming.
Luckily, my other "hobby" is programming. Therefore I started to write a software which would pull all the relevant stats from all the agencies which I contribute to and display them in a small window. Recently I've finished this software and have been using it a lot for myself.
Today, I'd like to announce that I'm providing this software, which I call "Microstock Monitor" to anyone for free. Microstock Monitor is a local windows application and it is from now on available for download at:
http://microstockmonitor.unfolded.com
and currently supports Shutterstock, Dreamstime, Fotolia, BigStockPhoto, StockXpert and LuckyOliver. iStockphoto is coming very soon.
Since I really appreciate the value of Microstock Group forums, I did contact Tyler (aka Leaf) and asked him if he could provide a forum to discuss Microstock Monitor in exchange for a link in the application. While it's easy enough to setup a forum these days, I did not want to set up just another forum, but rather work togeter with my favourite microstock discussion site in bringing this software to you. Tyler kindly accepted (after testing the software) - many thanks!
One question which Tyler immediately asked me was:
What assurance can you provide to myself and others that the software is safe to use (ie, password, user theft)?
which I answered with:
The software will run on the local computer of the user and will store all user information locally. It does not send the user information anywhere, except for the microstock agency web sites. The user can configure their firewall to allow the software to only communicate with the websites of the microstock agencies and therefore avoid any mis-communication with unknown servers. Windows standard firewall allows such a configuration.
Another question is which compensation I get for developing and maintaining this free software for you. The answer is quite simple. I've a links section on the Microstock Monitor website and links inside the software which have my referal code added to them. So if you like Microstock Monitor then I'd greatly appreciate it if you use one of those links to sign up with microstock agencies, which might give me a little compensation for my work. Thanks!
Said that, please go to http://microstockmonitor.unfolded.com and give it a try. I'd love to see you using this free software and I'd love to get your feedback in this forum. This is a new software, so I fully expect that it may have bugs (although it runs very stable on my machine) - so please report them back here as well!
Many thanks and all the best,
Michael