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.

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Although the site launched on 10/21, it seems that they’ve both been writing for a while and are in the process of publishing back posts (either that or they soft-launched back in September).

There were a number of things that disappointed me about their prior coverage, and I hope now that they are free from the restrictions of a big media news organization like the PI they’ll become better bloggers. Anyway, here are my suggestions for making TechFlash even better:

1. Full feeds. No respectable tech news source sends out partial RSS feeds. Attention is way more valuable than the incremental page views. I spend way more time reading the other publications on John Cook’s Feeds list than I have on his blog at the PI. Full-length feeds are a big part of that. If partial-feeds are a must, then at least write a paragraph feed summary - don’t just take the first 30 words…
2. Opinion. Please provide some. If all we wanted to know was what a company did, we could visit their website. Tell us if they will be successful or if they’ll flop or what you think of their offering.
3. Unique. Guest bloggers are great, but don’t just reprint their content. I subscribe to Andy Sack’s blog. I read his original post on venture over the holidays last week. I really don’t need to see the same thing twice in my feeds (yes, even though it was a good post).

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