There are always new sites promoting their agencies here, enticing us to join. But they often leave out the most important thing - show me the money, guys - or the potential, at least.

For example, if you were to invest in a new company, there are some basic business ratios that would be used to assess whether an investment has potential. Translating that into microstock terms, uploading my images to your site is an investment of my assets, time and potential erosion of sales to other sites, so I would need to make sure that there is compensation.

One business ratio that immediately comes to mind is Assets-to-Customer Base, which would tell me how much competition there is for sales on your site. For example, in their last published annual report, SS stated they had 900,000 active users. Currently they have 42,200,000 images. If we assume that they still have the same number of buyers, then their Assets-to-Customer Base would be 46.9. As they are the best performers at this stage, this can be the base ratio to compare to other agencies - if we can obtain that data.

So, New Sites, can you tell us how your agency compares to say, SS? Is your data transparent enough to provide us with this data? Do you know these figures?

Ratio analysis, of course, is only valuable where there is some type of useful comparison. For example, year to year within a company, or agency to agency. Perhaps, as a microstock photographers community, we can collect that information and store it for comparison between agencies. That would be most valuable, in my mind.

Does anyone here design apps?  I wish we had an app for keywording and tagging our images, does anyone here or know of anyone who can design one? Or is there anything out there on the market already?

It would be great if we had an app that can store data such as Author, Copyright Notice, Title, Description, and also keep a record of often used keywords under specific Category headings, and then can be easily applied to our images.

I know it is stored in PS or similar - but its still time consuming. I often use the same keywords for similar subjects and keep a separate word document for those. For example, we can then have a category called Christmas, and store all our generic keywords such as: festive, happy holidays, 25 December, etc. Or another for children, or finance, or whatever we often shoot. User defined of course.

I wouldn't then feel chained to my computer all day, and could sit there quietly at night doing my keywording on my iPad while my family watches TV.