MicrostockDiaries recently announced the launch of MicrostockCharts.com. It's a service that allows microstock photographers to record and plot graphs of their earnings. I guess the best way to learn about it is to read the full post on microstockdaires.

At the moment microstockcharts is simply a way for you to manually enter your monthly earnings, portfolio size and number of downloads etc. then plot graphs of RPI earnings and downloads. There is an option to make your charts public if you want to share them e.g. posting a link to your sales history on a forum.

What lies ahead is the most exciting part of microstockcharts: Benchmarking or comparison against the average sales of other microstock charts users. These features are currently in development so details are to be finalised.

The range of sales from month to month that we see even on medium sized portfolios is so large that doing any kind of tending comparison is very difficult. A good example of this was when all the stockxpert advertising was removed from sxc and replaced with istockphoto advertising; I wanted to see if my stats reflected the change, i.e. drop in sales at stockxpert and increase at istockphoto - If there was a change then I could not see it. Any change had been swamped in the normal variation from month to month, sometimes as much as 40% changes between good and bad months, less if I exclude extended licenses.

There are also plans to make it easier to import data into microstockcharts, without needing to disclose your agency login details.

I plan to enter my data into microstockcharts and share it. I've been, well I guess lazy in the past when it comes to sharing my sales - a large part of that is the time it takes to record and format this data into graphs. On their own, results from an individual month mean very little, only when plotted over a few months do you get a fairer picture of average sales and then become able to calculate a more realistic RPI etc.

I have written a slightly more in-depth review of the service, which I plan to keep up-to-date as new features are added.

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