Microstock entrepreneurs Amos Struck and Lee Torrens have launched Microstock Charts—a Website where microstock photographers can track earnings and other vital metrics. The site will display data collected from users in real-time charts and allow various market and performance benchmarking activities.
Interested in which agency is your lowest earner, how you stack up against other shooters, what effect your new keywording scheme is having on sales—or even which agencies are as profitable as they claim? Answering questions such as these is the ultimate goal of Microstock Charts.
Benchmarking will combine data from selected trusted photographer accounts to produce anonymous totals for earnings, portfolio size and downloads. Sell-through rate, return per image and return per download will be averaged.
But these benchmarking features are still a bit of time away. Torrens explains: “Many serious microstock contributors monitor their metrics in a spreadsheet. Microstock Charts is, at the moment, a poor comparison to that method. However, our aim is to make it so easy and useful that you’ll eventually want to abandon your spreadsheet in favor of this tool.” See the launch version of an individual photographer’s tracking page on Torrens’ own example here.
Torrens and Struck are partners in the GuteWolke Project, the business entity behind Microstock Charts. The venture focuses on cloud computing, as its name—which translates as “good cloud”—would suggest to someone who speaks German. Earlier this year, GuteWolke introduced a microstock plugin for blogging platform WordPress.