Aggregating Microstock data – LookStat
As more and more of our data moves to the cloud, it frequently gets scattered across different sites. As much as I love data, aggregating and normalizing it is a pain. I have been an advocate of Yodlee for nearly a decade, and have become so accustomed to it that I can’t imagine how people manage their finances or frequent flyer accounts without it.
- Sample Microstock by keitheddleman
Microstock (stock photos that cost <$10 per photo) has become an increasingly large business and is rapidly tearing the $2B traditional stock photography business to shreds. There are probably close to a fifty thousand individual photographers contributing photos to sites like istockphoto, fotolia and dreamstime.
If you are a photographer, you’ll submit your images to multiple sites: the sites are non-exclusive, it costs nothing to submit a photo and it increases your chance of selling the photo (which can be sold multiple times). But tracking the performance of your photos is very challenging - you need to download data files from multiple sites, normalize them and then somehow link the photo-by-photo performance data from the different sites.
Rahul and Casey Zednick just launched LookStat, a must use application for serious microstock photographers. Not only do they aggregate the data from multiple sites, but they also do the very hard work of normalizing your data. That means that you can see how much a single photo is making across all sites.
I fully expect that LookStat becomes an essential application for photographers. Congrats on the launch!
