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Messages - Rahul Pathak
76
« on: February 10, 2009, 03:16 »
I've signed up also, very nice idea, I like it, despite being a tad anxious re giving my passwords to a 3rd party site.
Would love to see StockXpert and 123RF on here also, besides FT of course 
Excellent work Rahul, what's your personal motivation for doing this? do are you looking at a monthly/yearly subscription fee down the track ?
Thanks for signing up! Our goal is to build a business by making life better for contributors so we do intend to charge in the future. It will be free for the vast majority and when we do charge a subscription it will be affordable. We're hard at work on Fotolia and will be adding more agencies in short order.
77
« on: February 09, 2009, 16:45 »
First impression: Looks good. Can't wait to have FT and StockXpert integrated.
Besides the image matching, that needs some tweaking (as has been mentioned here before, so let's wait...) one more point for your list: How to handle refunds. I just had a sale removed due to credit card fraud on DT, but on Lookstat it's still reflected in both total sales and on the day it was done (yesterday).
Thanks for signing up and for your patience re: image matching. I've added the refund issue to our list as well. We are actively working on FT. Cheers, Rahul
78
« on: February 06, 2009, 09:44 »
Nice feature. Unfortunately the systems doesn't recognize the same image from all the sites, so some images have their earnings split in two or more.
We knew this feature would highlight areas where our matching doesn't do as well as it should. I've updated the known issues page on our blog to reflect this. This is definitely an area that will get our attention but it will be after we add fotolia support to the the site. dirkr - thanks for signing up - great to have you as a user. also, thank you for flagging the currency & credit issues. ldambies - glad you like the feature! also, thanks for the fotolia currency nudge as well. we'll do the best we can on this. Thanks a ton everyone. Rahul
79
« on: February 05, 2009, 20:37 »
Hi All,
The new feature Rahul has added is now making this software very helpful if you use multiple sites. It only now shows you a handful of images separately but once it can show you all you images I think it will help a great deal in seeing what is making you money and what isn't as well as what season and that image. Looking forward to the upgrade let us know when it is going to be released I would love to try it.
Best,
AVAVA
Just a quick follow up to let folks know that we added the ability to view all images that sold at all the sites. More details on our blog: http://blog.lookstat.com/2009/02/05/new-lookstat-feature-view-all-images-that-sold-at-all-microstock-sites-in-one-place/Also, Fotolia stats are next and should be available in the very near future.
80
« on: February 02, 2009, 19:07 »
I just signed up and am in a holding pattern while my stats are collected. I'm curious to know how it handles the same image across sites, but with a different title on some sites.
Hi there, Thanks for signing up. Our matching is definitely not perfect but it will improve over time. Please let me know how it turns out. The initialization process can take up to 48 hours but in most cases is quicker than that. Please feel free to contact me directly with any questions or feedback. Sincerely, Rahul
81
« on: February 02, 2009, 12:25 »
No problem, at this stage of your site development I see this as just a funny bug - though hope you can fix it soon
Thanks for understanding and we will definitely get this sorted out as soon as we can.
82
« on: February 02, 2009, 10:51 »
Per-image stats would be useful if it was correct. Just checked one of my images - its downloads in IS and DT are shown being ~ twice more than in reality.....
Too bad, I hoped that I just missed some downloads
While we are hoping that we can help contributors boost their earnings, this is clearly the wrong way to do it. Thanks for pointing this out. I'll follow up directly so we can get this resolved asap. Thanks for the feedback and sorry about the discrepancy.
83
« on: February 01, 2009, 17:43 »
Signed up a couple of weeks ago. Cool site! looking forward to the addition of the other missing sites, particularly FT, STX.
It doesn't appear to be recording EL sales properly, maybe Rahul can clarify this?
Thanks for signing up! We currently do have a bug with istock EL sales but it is something we aim to fix in very short order. Also, Fotolia is next in the pipeline. We don't cover every single earnings scenario yet, but we are committed to getting there. Avava - thanks for the kind words re: image earnings history. (You can currently hack the site URL to see more images (change the 1 to the 2 etc but a page showing all images is in the works!) To all of you - thanks for the support and the feedback. It's a real treat to not be working on this in a vacuum.
84
« on: January 28, 2009, 23:59 »
Rahul, what time the date is changed on the site?
Cannot catch exactly, but at least at 7PM PST it is already tomorrow at lookstat...
it's on GMT. This is something we know about, but have not gotten to yet.
85
« on: January 28, 2009, 21:57 »
I'd be more interested in seeing my sales volume by image in a coherent manner. Istock is best in that regard with their Sales per Month stat as an example. SS's stats suck big time, worthless in most cases. It would really help to see all my images plotted out with sales stats per site. Just dreaming, I know. But I wonder how many sales are lost by, say, SS, by not providing meaningful results for contributors?
Image sales history by site is live. http://blog.lookstat.com/2009/01/28/image-sales-history-thumbnails-are-now-clickable/Cheers, Rahul PS: For those of you who I've told about this already, my apologies.
86
« on: January 28, 2009, 13:25 »
If you can use this data to perform a highly-desirable task that would otherwise require several hours of work (i.e. maximizing sales), you'll have a product that everyone will want.
Correct. For the moment, we only have glorified FTP uploaders and quaky databases of what you uploaded to several sites, not to mention tools that live of the (keywording) sweat of others. Lookstat has a dynamite potential and can bring something new. In another thread Rahul hinted at a functionality to track an image's performance over several sites. I figure he has to use some image recognition software for that. That would really be innovative.
Lookstat also has the potential (given enough members) to yield real sales figures in general of different agencies, without having to rely on subjective polls. As such, it would be unique, and he could sell these metrics to the site owners easily for big $.
While I'm always wishing we could move faster in bringing contributors some of the tools we have in our heads, one feature we just launched is image sales history. Here's a blog post about it - feedback as always is welcome. http://blog.lookstat.com/2009/01/28/image-sales-history-thumbnails-are-now-clickable/Thanks for the kind words of support.
87
« on: January 27, 2009, 14:58 »
this is a really cool idea. we just added individual image sales history and once we add Fotolia, I think we might be able to take a stab at this. I think we could just look at avg sales for exclusives vs. not and come up with a simple equation.
...
If you implement it well enough I can see this being your primary sales point. Let's face it, it only takes 15 minutes per day at most to track sales across multiple sites. Obtaining the data isn't the hard or beneficial part, analyzing it is. If you can use this data to perform a highly-desirable task that would otherwise require several hours of work (i.e. maximizing sales), you'll have a product that everyone will want. You won't be able to take orders fast enough. As it stands now, I see little or no benefit to using lookstat - I do more than it does with little effort.
That being said, you clearly need to do more market research. You're making a product that tracks sales and you don't even know which agencies offer exclusivity? If you're serious about making lookstat a success you'd better get on the ball, Rahul.
All points well taken sir. I do agree that the real value comes in turning data into information that actually lets you do something.
88
« on: January 27, 2009, 12:03 »
Thinking out loud about this further, this would be an excellent application for lookstat, which could have a built-in "Sales Maximizer" that would run analyses to determine if you'd be better off listing an image at multiple sites or have it listed exclusively on either DT or FT. I'll give the lookstat guys a 'heads up' on the idea.
this is a really cool idea. we just added individual image sales history and once we add Fotolia, I think we might be able to take a stab at this. I think we could just look at avg sales for exclusives vs. not and come up with a simple equation. I gather Fotolia and DT allow exclusivity on a per image basis?
89
« on: January 22, 2009, 16:54 »
I think the beer fund contribution is coming out of my own pocket  - our unofficial motto (your tweet) is alive and well. San Jose is going to be a great time. Rahul
90
« on: January 22, 2009, 09:05 »
If we're getting a group together we better meet on the Monday night - between the two conference days. I know some people are arriving just before the start and others are leaving right after it finishes.
So let's meet on Monday at 6pm. The conference program finishes at 4:30pm and there's a networking function that I (and hopefully others) will be attending which runs until 5:30pm. If we meet in the foyer of the Marriott Hotel (literally adjacent to the convention center and will be easy access after hours) then we can decide where to go from there.
Andres is in and I let Yuri know the details. Leaf and Sean, can you make this time? Who else will be there?
Monday at 6pm. I'm in and I'll be contributing to the beer fund. Looking forward to meeting as many new faces as possible and seeing Lee & Andres again. Cheers, Rahul PS: Lee - phenomenal job pulling this together. I think you deserve a massive pat on the back.
91
« on: January 22, 2009, 00:24 »
So I don't have extra tickets, but if anyone does make it there, I'd love to meet in person and buy you a beer. I think the event should be a blast and Lee (Torrens) has done an awesome job pulling it together.
Cheers,
Rahul
92
« on: January 19, 2009, 17:59 »
Is there any third party security audits planned on site security so we can trust to store our passwords? And how about thawte or similar daily security scans etc?
The idea behind the system is very good and I will gladly use the system, but I need to well known third party confirmation about site security before I can trust my passwords to any third party organizations.
br, MjP
Hi there, Thanks again for this feedback. We have implemented daily third party intrusion testing via McAfee Secure. I am proud to say that we passed out of the gate and you can see the badge in our footer. (This is the same vendor used by SS/DT/123.) Cheers, Rahul
93
« on: January 15, 2009, 01:52 »
I would like the ability to see the top performers by Downloads at each site. The reason I suggest this is 1 EL sale, or even a On Demand sale at SS can vastly skew the data. The way I tend to judge a photo's performance is to look at the DL's at each site, and then multiply the average earnings per DL at the site to get a better gage of earnings performance...assuming that over time the subscription sales, EL's, and PPD's all even out.
For instance I know that over time I tend to make about 40 cents per DL at Shutterstock. If I am getting 10 DL's per month from an image at SS, I know that image is worth about $4.00 per month from SS even if one recent EL sale generated $28.
Thanks for trying out the service and I think your suggestion is a good one. I'll see what we can do about it. Also, thanks for sharing your thinking about averages and per site earnings performance. It's really helpful to get a feel for what matters in terms of metrics. Cheers, Rahul
94
« on: January 14, 2009, 12:48 »
That magic number is an interesting idea. I hadn't heard about it before.
On lookstat, couldn't you make it so that we could find out any numbers or graph whatever numbers we wanted. Just give a variable list and a code box and let us create our own stats and graph them. You could even have it to share stat formulas with eachother, or like have a list of top stat formulas
Just following up on this. It turns out that this is something we could do. Given what's on our plate, it won't happen for a while, but it's a cool idea.
95
« on: January 13, 2009, 20:11 »
Hi Rahul,
I have to say we have definitely steered away fro RPI and really are tracking per shoot now for quite some time.
Best,
AVAVA
Thanks for sharing that and it makes sense to me. One big issue with RPI is that it is often calculated as an average (Total Earnings for the Month / Total Images) which obscures a lot of detail. If you could look at the individual sales curve for an image or a collection of images (a shoot), it might tell you a lot more.
96
« on: January 13, 2009, 17:43 »
Also, I'm a big fan of the microstock bestsellers site that you had put together.
I was not expecting that it would interest anybody... I don't have much time to imrpove it or even keep it up to date 
I'm sure you will perform a lot better with your own site
I'm sure quite a few people found the site useful (and humbling). Thanks for the good wishes wrt to LookStat...
97
« on: January 13, 2009, 17:36 »
I refer to this metric as lifetime earnings but I think it's a great way to think about images in your portfolio. Another metric that I think would be useful is grouping a shoot together and looking at the lifetime earnings for the shoot and time to breakeven on a particular shoot as well.
Abso-smurf-ly! Would be great.
Excellent smurf usage there...
98
« on: January 13, 2009, 16:57 »
That magic number is an interesting idea. I hadn't heard about it before.
On lookstat, couldn't you make it so that we could find out any numbers or graph whatever numbers we wanted. Just give a variable list and a code box and let us create our own stats and graph them. You could even have it to share stat formulas with eachother, or like have a list of top stat formulas
That's an interesting idea. I'm not sure of the performance implications/complexity of that but I'll check with my co-founder. My guess is I'm going to get a swift kick to the painful parts, but we'll see...
99
« on: January 13, 2009, 14:37 »
The magic number is kind of cool. It's good for your goals to get progressively more challenging as you get better.
Thanks for sharing your perspective. Also, I'm a big fan of the microstock bestsellers site that you had put together.
Cheers,
Rahul
100
« on: January 13, 2009, 11:42 »
I refer to this metric as lifetime earnings but I think it's a great way to think about images in your portfolio. Another metric that I think would be useful is grouping a shoot together and looking at the lifetime earnings for the shoot and time to breakeven on a particular shoot as well.
Do you think about your portfolio in this way? Or do you focus on the per image earnings?
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