Microstockr – keeping track of your sales
Although I had heard of the application before, I had never got round to looking in more detail at Microstockr until recently. I’m glad I did! I downloaded Microstockr Pro – the beta desktop version and so far I have been very impressed. There are things they are still working on (a new update came through just this morning), but it is giving me a lot of insight into my portfolio that would be hard to find any other way.
I understand that the desktop version is free, the mobile version is free for the main stock agencies, but there is a $0.99 monthly subscription on the mobile App to get all the agencies they support. I haven’t tried the mobile App (both Android and Apple available), but I would happily pay $0.99 a month for the information I am now seeing.
They currently support the following agencies:
I won’t repeat all the good stuff that is in the program and described on their site, but here are the things I found interesting!
First, it gives me an overall view of the daily and monthly performance of many of my agencies and it can be set to update at any time interval you set. I chose hourly. I don’t spend a lot of time tracking daily sales, but it is interesting to look from time to time! Then, it shows you the thumbnails of what has sold recently on each agency and the amount earned so you can watch if your newly uploaded image has sold today! But the one I found most interesting was the best seller list. At first, this shows the best selling images agency by agency, so the same image will appear more than once. However, you can start a “Match all” process (that took 24 hours on my portfolio) where it matches all the images that have been uploaded to multiple agencies and shows you the sales across each one for that single image. It is very hard to do that manually. So I can see that my bengal cat image has sold 2520 times for $2634 across all the agencies I’m tracking.
This is interesting in determining which are really the best sellers, but it also told me that the Washington Monument shot in position 4 only appears to be on Shutterstock – no other matches of this image came up. With many images to upload, there are going to be glitches and sometimes a good image is rejected from a site. This insight gives me the opportunity to rework the image a bit (if it was rejected previously from some sites) and then upload it to the missing sites and hopefully earn some more cash from my existing portfolio.
Give Microstockr a try – I think you will find it to be a great little application!
I use that software to. Its nice 🙂
Nice software. But seem to have problem logging into canstockphoto.
Yes, I noticed that as well. This must be a bug in the new update. I’ll let the developer know.
There is a new release just out that fixes the Canstock issue
Steve
I’ve found it very useful (and fun) to see what trends I have in sales and which sites certain shots do best on. The Match feature is super useful but I’ve found the automatic option only goes so far, it seems to only match up to about two-thirds accuracy as when I then do shots manually often a lot more matching info appears.
Not a criticism exactly, just an observation, choosing Match on recent sellers is quite fun to reveal where it has sold across the agencies.
All-in-all, a great app and probably only going to get better as time goes on.
I agree – the auto match took at least 3 days for me, and there are still missing ones as you say. I wonder if I did slightly different submissions from time to time – ie something gets rejected from SS, say, so I slightly reworked the image and that is why the match doesn’t occur? Anyway, it is pretty clever stuff. I suggested to the developer that a feature to tell me if a site does not have any sales for a particular image that is a “best seller” on other sites could tell me which ones I should try to re-upload. I’m doing that manually at the moment because I know that I stopped uploading to Fotolia for a time when they were rejecting many images.